73: Lisa Marshall on Workplace Management and Leaving Well
Lisa Marshall is founder and principal of Good Work Consulting, where she helps for-purpose professionals get to the strategic part of their to-do list.
She knows how it feels to be stuck fielding an endless list of to-dos that are urgent and important, but don’t necessarily build capacity. And what it’s like to daydream about the projects that would make things better (if there were only time to get to them).
She specializes in project management, implementation support, and data visualization and reporting. The work that energizes her the most is connecting people and tools, so that (work) life becomes just a little more manageable.
She lives in Dallas, TX with her husband and two dogs, Eleanor and Franklin.
Main quote:
“If you can create an inflow of all of the tasks and all of the information that comes to you into the work management system that you're using, you will get so much more done. There will not be balls dropped. You’ll be able to do more than you thought you could, and you'll be less stressed while you're doing it.”
Additional Quotes:
“There’s dashboards that nonprofits need and they fall into three buckets: executive, analytical, and public facing.”
“For me, leaving well is about having a mindset or looking at things through the lens of what's the best that could happen? And that's for the person who's leaving. It's for the people who are staying. It's for the things that are yet to come. But what's the best that could happen?”
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This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley
Transcript:
Lisa Marshall is founder and principal of Good Work Consulting, which you can find at her website, goodworkflow. co, where she helps for purpose professionals get to the strategic part of their to do list. Lisa knows how it feels to be stuck fielding an endless list of to dos that are urgent and important, but don't necessarily build capacity.
She also knows what it's like to daydream about the projects that would make things better, if only there were time to get to them. She specializes in project management, implementation support, and data visualization and reporting, which are three of the coolest things that I love so much. The work that energizes Lisa the most is connecting people and tools so that life and work becomes just a little bit more manageable.
She lives in Dallas, Texas with her husband and two dogs, Eleanor and Franklin, and Lisa, I'm really excited for this conversation and to have you. I am so excited to be here as well, and I have been looking forward to it. I can't wait to talk about how we can just make things better for all these wonderful organizations.
I love it. I love it. So one of the other things that I love is your tagline, helping nonprofit leaders multiply themselves. And I would love if you would share a little bit about how your work came to be, why you've landed on this specific body of work, which is to help nonprofit leaders through project management, data dashboard development, et cetera.
Thanks. Bye bye. Sure. So, you know, my professional career has been 100 percent in the nonprofit sector and about 80 percent of it was with one organization. I started there as the second employee. I like to joke, you know, I was working there full time and getting paid for half of it. And the organization when I joined was just about six months old, so I really grew up with the organization.
And there were lots of educators, lots of people with a teaching background there. And so we, we understood how important it was to, uh, make good use of your time and optimize things. And we loved system and process, and we were asked all the time, How do you do this? Or what's your system for this? Or how do you get all of those things done?
And I saw how much just the smallest, but I, you know, you could maybe think of it as low hanging fruit, but how much just those small tweaks, if you could get to them, would would there were levers that could make a big impact for the people in the organization and doing the work. You know, there were times myself when I had the responsibility responsibilities of more than one person, maybe, you know, more than two, maybe three or four.
And, you know, like we said in the intro, it meant that you really can never get to those capacity building things. The things that you're sitting there and you're doing the thing and you're making the thing and you're like, gosh, there's got to be a better way. I wish I had time to just do this. But it was so hard to get to and over time, I've developed a lot of kind of like systems and processes and packs for, uh, making space for all of those things that really will make a difference and help nonprofit professionals multiply themselves.
Of course, it would also be great if we could just have appropriate funding for organizations and people didn't, didn't have to multiply themselves. Right, right. Well, I love, I love, part of what I love about what you do is that it literally is dealing with the reality that we have in front of us, which oftentimes is capacity.
I would like to talk a little bit about, and this is something that when we first met, I really was excited about with the concept of data dashboards, um, you talk about having three essential types, and I would love if you can dig into those three and then how they might benefit, um, different organizations who maybe they're prioritizing knowledge transfer and organizational health.
Maybe it's on the fundraising side. Maybe it's, you know, I would love to just hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, absolutely. So Organizations, I feel like there's the dashboards that nonprofits need really kind of fall into three buckets. Those three buckets are the executive. The analytical and then the public facing and you know, when I talk about these three dashboards, they could live in different places or exist in different tools, right?
Because those are three really different purposes. Your executive dashboard is where, you know, this is something you might share with the board. Um, you know, as the name implies, the leadership of the organization is looking at it. It's for the executive director. It's for the leadership team. It's for the board.
It's going to show some key metrics. You know, those. Key performance indicators if your organization has identified those, but not just for programs, it should be for across the organization. Right? So you might even be looking at things like tenure of, um, employees, um, you know, dependent upon the size of the organization.
Maybe you can filter that by. Department, right? Although filtering that's getting into one of the other dashboards. So hold on that. Um, but key metrics about fundraising, right? Like, what, how many months on hand cash does the organization have, right? You want it to be a layout. That's really easy for you to PDF.
And share again, like I said, with the board in a free read, there should probably be some benchmark indicators so that when people look at it, they know, well, what does this number mean? Are we on track off track? Are we consistent with what the expectation is that we've set for ourselves or for the industry?
There's not going to be a lot of like filters or slicers or kind of like interactive features because the people that are looking at it. They just want, they want to know. Exactly what it means at first glance, right? And you're probably going to update it monthly to quarterly. So that's the executive dashboard and.
I'll go into the analytical. So the analytical then is internal and it could have some of the same information and metrics that are in the executive dashboard, but you're going to have all those filters. You're going to be able to slice things by department. You're going to be able to look at specific time periods.
Right? Um, and there's probably going to be many pages to the dashboard that are for individual departments, you know, so you might have, Some key metrics and information around volunteers, um, around your fundraising and development efforts, financials might have their own tab and then of course your program and impact data, which is what, you know, I think when people hear the word dashboard, that's what they think of first is that this is just like a report of how we're doing.
With our programs and certainly that's included, but all those other things are part of it as well and the public facing dashboard. That's where you're telling your story. You're probably not going to talk about months of cash on hand on the public facing dashboard, right? It's for the public. It's data that educates and informs stakeholders.
And it might even include information from other organizations that maybe are proxy to have proxy data or help support your, your mission and your vision and and help you tell the story of your case for support. You're probably updating it annually, maybe quarterly, um, and this is 1 that, you know, you might share it with funders.
It's on your website. People can, you know, they can visit it and maybe you do also have the option to kind of print it or pdf it so you could put it in an impact report or you could pull graphics or certain charts from it for your impact. I love that. And what makes. It was interesting when you were talking at the very beginning and you said, I think this is really key for the person listening.
You said, it's an opportunity to get really deep into your KPIs, your key performance indicators. And then what was important is you said, if those have been identified. And I think that's something that I I'll be honest, I'm surprised about that a lot of organizations, mostly nonprofits, don't have them identified.
So I'm curious if that is part of, you know, say an organization calls you after hearing this and like, Lisa, we need your help, but they don't have KPIs identified. Is that part of what you can help walk someone through? Can you take maybe a strat plan or I don't know what, what would you take to help them identify KPIs?
Absolutely. So organizations and you know, I think that I lived this. I did not know what a KPI was 10 years ago, maybe even seven years ago. Okay. People that work at nonprofit, they just get started. They just get the work done. They don't need it to be labeled a KPI to know what they need to do to make things better.
But of course, when you want to grow and you, you start needing to make strategic decisions, then, you know, you need those goals. You need those indicators to show progress and that you're working toward whatever strategic goals, um, you have you've chosen. So yes, whether folks have a strategic plan. So I sometimes like to joke like, you know, strategic plans are the most expensive PDFs on earth, right?
Like nobody, nobody does a strategic plan. Nobody spends 20, 000, 40, 000, 70, 000 or more on a strategic plan just to have a PDF or like a binder with a really nice cover page, right? But sometimes that is what happens. Sometimes, you know, so because we have to operationalize all of that. And not all strategic plans come with, you know, come with that piece.
So, absolutely, whether folks have a strategic plan that is current, or maybe they have one that's outdated, or they're ramping up for one, there's absolutely a place for operationalizing or planning to operationalize. That strategic plan. And it's really, it's not that hard to do right. A good strategic plan.
You can take all those goals and you can waterfall them down to align with people's individual job responsibilities and make sure that they're tied to their performance goals, you know, for the quarter or the year. However, you're looking at that and make sure that everyone's aligned right and set up for success.
So that's absolutely something that, um, that I can help with and I love doing it and, and have participated and supported those efforts, uh, for organizations. And it's really great to just be able to help a team see that like, Oh, okay, we can actually do this. And this is how we're going to do it. Yeah, I also love the idea of, you know, most, like you said, most draft plans are the most expensive PDF ever, and they're also the things that collect the most dust at a non profit, and so I love the light bulb that goes on for a staff member, um, whether it's an outreach team member, frontline, director level, program level, whatever it is, when they're like, oh, that's what that's for, I get it now and I get how it applies to me and I love that you mentioned because this is so important tying it to then the individual player's goals for the year because then that also ties into retention because if people know what they're supposed to be doing and know how they're going to be measured, oh my gosh, it changes everything.
I love it. Absolutely. And what I really hope, you know, if people work management platforms. So a lot of times we use these terms interchangeably of like project management or work management platforms. And here I'm talking about, you know, all the ones we've heard of, like Asana and Trello or monday. com or Basecamp.
I mean, there's somebody out there. Notion. You know how I feel about Notion. But there are, there's so many options, right? And they all have things about them that are unique and I feel that the one that is the best is the one that you use and that is actually useful for your organization. But one of the best ways to get everybody on the bus is to kind of like, you want to work from the top down and from the bottom up.
But the strategic plan allows you to work from the top down. So work management works the best when you use it for everything. And so if we have our goals tied to that, and we have, uh, you know, if we have an employee's goals and their performance and you know, what they are supposed to be working on, if that information and that single source of truth is in that work management system, then that's going to help them, you know, work in that system.
And make sure that they're documenting all the things that they're doing and all the great work that they're doing. It's in that system, which also makes it easier for them to update their resume, you know, on an annual basis or a biannual basis, or be able to talk about the value that they've brought to the organization.
Right? Everybody talks about, like, email yourself to your personal email, all the great stuff that you've done on a quarterly basis so that you, you know, can update your resume. Right. Which you can do it that way, but you can do it in a much more organized way and have a lot more information at your fingertips if you're cataloging all of that in a work management system.
I also think from a work management perspective, this also helps immensely for nonprofits who, I don't know if I'm speaking to you as you listen to this, but If you are in a nonprofit where pilots and program launches happen all the time, or we're just going to do this one thing because a funder asked us to, or the community asked us to, being able to track in some kind of a project management or work management or, um, database helps you understand, was it successful?
What did you learn from it? Do you have the right team members in place? What didn't get done? Like even sometimes the what didn't get done is as important as the what, what did get done. So I'm loving all of this. And I would love to know with your knowledge of nonprofits, the clients that you work with, what do you wish like the one or two top things that you wished nonprofit leaders, the one that's listening to this podcast, what do you want them to know about work management or project management that you haven't already covered?
I would say that another opportunity that work management systems provide is. That retention of institutional knowledge, but also the opportunity for individuals in your organization to learn and grow. So one of the things that I talk about with work management systems is that you can lurk and learn.
Okay, so you can subscribe to, you know, boards or projects that maybe, you know, if the systems are set up like this, right? That if you have permissions to subscribe to boards that maybe you're not directly involved with that, you know, say I'm in programs, but I subscribe to some of the grants management or grants pipeline boards.
Okay. Then you can see the updates and get information kind of, you know, in your, in your inbox, right? And I don't mean your email inbox. I mean, in the platform. Okay. That's a whole other who you're using your inbox as a to do list. We'll talk about that later, but, but you're getting all of those updates and you, you can kind of little bit learned by osmosis.
It can just help open your eyes to other parts of the organization and what's going on in it. Right. And I think that's. A really wonderful opportunity for people if they choose, you know, if that's something that they're interested in, but then the institutional knowledge that you can preserve. By using work management systems, like you said, maybe you can, you can, it's easier to do postmortems.
What worked, what didn't right? But if you want to replicate an event that you had, and you are going to do that event again next year, you have all you have the to do list. You have all the files. It makes it so much easier. Even when you have people transitioning in and out of the organization. In and out of projects, in and out of positions, you know, you don't have to tell somebody when they give their, their notice, like, okay, well, I need you to write a job in your last 10 days here.
I need you to write a job manual and write down everything that you've been doing for the past 5 years. I also think about nonprofits that are consultant heavy, which I am a huge fan of. Um, it makes that job a lot easier and it also lets more of the data and the knowledge that the consultant is bringing, the expertise.
It lets more of that stay with the organization. I'm also wondering, Lisa, about board dashboards. That's something that's been coming up a lot for my clients lately. Um, does that fall in maybe a fourth bucket when you were talking about the executive, the internal, and the public? Or would that fall more in with one of the others?
In the past, I've thought of it as part of the executive dashboard, because even the executive director, I think, except maybe at very, very large organizations. The executive director is probably looking honestly, you know, most nonprofits in those analytical like internal dashboards frequently and the executive one is, is really for those executive directors and for the board.
That doesn't mean that you couldn't have a tab that maybe is. Um, and then there's a version of the same thing that's slightly different for the board. And then maybe there's one for the executive director that has a few differences, but the, the theme of that one is just like, give me the high level, give me the, you know, some people say 20, 000 30, 000.
I never know how many tens of thousands of feet it is, but it's. Some, some multiple tens of thousands of feet. Yeah, it's not ground level. Right. But I've got a couple of questions around leaving well and change and transition, but before we get to those, I'd love for you to say to the listener anything that you haven't yet.
We could talk about this, I mean, for hours probably, but what else do you want the listener to hear about the work that you do and the importance of it for their organization? You know, I, I definitely am a work management evangelist. It made such a difference for me in my role. Um, you know, I, and in the many different roles that I held, uh, at previous organizations, and if you want to get started with work management and you want it to be successful, what you want to think about is.
How can I build a system for myself where I spend the most time possible in that system every single day? So we talked a little bit of, I mentioned, you know, like, uh, that your email inbox should really isn't a good to do list. And, um, on my website, I don't know if it's out yet, but I have a newsletter coming up, a blog post coming up about that soon, and people can read more there, but if you can create, and there are ways to do this, and I talk about this, too, you know, in my work, people can go to my website to learn more, but if you can create an inflow.
Of all of the tasks and all of the places that information comes from for you, if you can create an inflow into the work management system that you're using, then you will get so much more done. There will not be balls drop and you will be able to do more than you thought that you could, that you could do and you'll be less stressed while you're doing it.
And yeah, we don't have enough time for me to go into the whole system and exactly how to do it, but you know, again, on my website, people can, um, sign up for different resources that I have and, you know, even do like some over the shoulder videos of me setting up systems and things like that. So give it, give it a good, give it a shot.
That's, that's what I have to say to everybody is like, don't sleep on work management. I'm even thinking as you're talking, Lisa, that maybe by the time this comes out, we'll have brainstormed some workshops that we could do together and invite some folks in. That might be really, really good. That would be so fun.
I'm curious to talk a little bit about change and transition. What three words or what phrase would you use to describe your own relationship to change and transition? When I transitioned away from my previous organization, I had been there a long time, you know, I had been there more than 12 years and lots of people at the organization had also had very long tenures there.
And so it was really a family and I felt all kinds of ways about the decision that I had made. But the word that I just came back to was building. And I knew that, you know, there was so much that had been built by the team, um, that I was part of, and I knew that I, in my new role, that I would be able to help more organizations build to bigger and better things and to reaching more people and, you know, to, to just helping in their own way to make their little corner of the earth.
You know, better. So I think that's the word. I think built. We're building. I love that. I love that. And then my, my last question for you, and maybe you've answered it a little bit already with what you just said, but what is the concept of leaving? Well, mean to you, I've been thinking about this a lot. I knew you were going to ask this question.
I listened to your podcast. I'm a subscriber. For me, I think it is about having a mindset or looking at things through the lens of what's the best that could happen. What's the best that could happen? And that's for, it's for the person who's leaving, it's for the people who are staying, it's for the things that are yet to come.
Yeah, what's the best that could happen? I love that. That's a perfect way to end this podcast episode. I am thrilled about your knowledge being out into the world. I'm so glad that your work exists, and I'm really excited for those of you that are listening, reach out to Lisa. Use the ideas that you might have had sparked while you've listened to Lisa talk and do something about it and bring it into, bring work management into your organizations.
Lisa, so much for joining the podcast. Thank you so much for this invitation. I love talking with you. And thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. If you are an organizational leader, board member, or a curious staff member, take the Leaving Well Assessment to discover your organization's transition readiness archetype.
It's quick and easy, and you can find it at naomihataway. com forward slash assessment. That's Naomi, N A O M I. H A T T A W A Y dot com forward slash assessment. To learn more about Leaving Well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace, you can also see that information on my website.
It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide. To shift culture and to create transformation until next time. I'm your host, Naomi Hadaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a navigation guide for workplace transitions.