Marcia Beckner
Welcome back to the Nonprofit CEO Spark podcast. I’m Marcia Beckner, your host.
Today, I wanna tell you about a client of mine. I’ll call him John, which is not his real name, but if you’ve ever avoided a hard conversation because the person wasn’t technically yours to manage, this episode is for you.
So here’s the situation.
Setting the Scene
John leads a nonprofit based in New York City, and his organization shares a building with another organization.
They split a common space, think of a shared lobby or a waiting area, that both of their visitors pass through before ever getting to either office.
The other organization’s director is a perfectly nice person, but she’s oblivious.
She plays music loudly during calls. She lets her kids wander around the shared space, running around.
She leaves stuff like food wrappers and cups and personal items in that shared lobby space.
She likes to work there rather than her own closed-door office, so she’s just in the entryway and just causing chaos.
And John, my client’s staff, started coming to him, saying, “Hey, can you say something? Our clients are noticing, and it’s making them very uncomfortable when they walk in our office.”
And I wanna pause here because this matters. John’s clients are already in a vulnerable, sensitive place when they walk through that door.
They’re not there for something casual. They’re there for something difficult, and the first thing they experience before they even reach John’s office is chaos.
That noise, that mess. It’s the opposite of the environment that he’d worked so hard to create inside his own walls.
So his staff kept flagging it to him, and John kept not doing anything for weeks.
The Real Problem Behind the Problem
And when we got into this conversation during one of our coaching sessions, John said something that so many of you have said to me in different words.
He said, “I don’t wanna make this weird. I don’t have any actual authority over this other person. We’re kind of colleagues, and I don’t wanna damage that relationship.”
He knew the solution the whole time. He knew he needed to have a direct conversation, but every time it came up, he talked himself into a different plan.
Maybe leave, like, a passive note or maybe he’d just quietly clean up for her himself.
Maybe it would resolve on its own. We all hope that, right? Maybe this problem will just fix itself.
Anything but having the actual conversation, and that’s the real problem behind the problem.
It wasn’t that he didn’t know what needed to happen, it’s that he didn’t feel like he had the right thing to say, he had the right to say it, because there was no, like, formal authority, no reporting line, nothing on an org chart that said that, “This is your job to manage.”
She wasn’t his employee. She was just someone who happened to share his office space.
So he kept telling himself it wasn’t his place to speak up, but his staff and his clients didn’t care whose org chart the problem sat on. They experienced it as his culture.
And every day he remained silent, his team started quietly resenting him that he wasn’t taking the bull by the horns and having that conversation.
The Reframe That Changed Everything
And he kept telling me he was trying to protect the relationship, protect the relationship with the other director from the other organization.
And I said, “John, are you sure that’s the right relationship to protect?”
He looked at me kind of confused, and so I said it in a different way.
I said, “What about your relationship with your own staff, the people watching you not step up week after week? Isn’t that a relationship, too? Isn’t that the one you actually want to protect?”
And there was a long pause, and he sort of started nodding slowly, and I said, “Yeah, I know. I’ve actually started to feel some resentment from my team about this,” he told me. “I just, I really hate conflict.”
And I said, “But when you walk into that shared space, I want you to remember something. Like, who are you the executive director for?
You’re not the executive director of that building. You’re not the executive director of the other person.
You are the executive director, though, of your staff and your culture and the environment that you’re building for your clients. That’s the relationships on the line here, not a semi-partner sharing your lobby.”
And that’s when the light bulb went off. I could tell. You could hear it.
He got quiet, and then he said, “Okay. You’re right. I’m scheduling that conversation for Monday.”
The solution was never complicated. He knew what to do the whole time. What he needed was a reframe of who he was actually protecting by avoiding it.
Because once he saw that he’d been protecting the wrong relationship, the excuse stopped holding up.
So here’s what we built together for that Monday conversation.
Preparing for the Conversation
So then John and I started preparing for that Monday conversation together.
First, I asked him to get specific, not like things have been kind of off in the lobby, but actual concrete… make a concrete list of things that he needed to change to protect his clients and his staff.
For example, the loud music, the kids that were running around, the food wrappers left in the shared space the Zoom calls without headphones on.
So he, we, you know, together we like to put together this list that he was gonna ask his, you know, partner in the other organization to change behaviors around.
And really first to start this conversation saying, “Hey, I, you know, I love sharing space with you and, you know, I love partnering with you when we can and having really great conversations together.
But I wanna talk to you about an issue on something that could really help improve, um, our work environment for both of us.
And it’s come to my attention that my clients feel a little uncomfortable coming in when there’s a stranger in the share- in the lobby area that’s working, appears to be working for us, that is talking loud on Zoom calls or playing music or, or, you know, scolding kids.
And it’s, they, my clients, John’s clients, are in a very precarious position where they really need support.
And when they come in in this precarious position already on, with a low-level sense of anxiety about who they’re gonna meet and can they trust, you know, this organization to support them, we’ve gotta give them, like, a peaceful environment to walk into.
And so by just having that conversation with the other partner, John started to see that actually this doesn’t have to damage our relationship. This could actually improve relationships across the board.
And if John could really stand up for what his organization, his staff, and his clients need to succeed, we have to assume that the other person is going to understand and change their behavior.
The other person, the partner organization, has two closed office spaces behind closed doors that they can do anything they want with.
They can have their kids, they can have their food wrappers, they can have their open Zoom calls, they can play their music.
What John is asking is just in that central open area, that that is a sacred space for clients to work in, walk into, and feel safe.
That is the first feeling that they need their clients to have in order to trust them to be able to support them.
Clear Is Kind
That is what we worked through on our coaching call, and I know I’m talking about this because a lot of my clients, a lot of friends and colleagues that I talk to that have been executive directors over the years, it’s, like, one of the hardest things that we can do, that we do, is to have difficult conversations.
But it’s one of the most important things to get good at. And there’s a way to get good at it.
There’s a way to prepare in advance, and there’s a way, there’s a tone to use that can be very direct, yet kind.
And, you know, something I’ve said to other clients that I learned myself is that clear is kind.
And another one of my clients told me once, like, “Once you told me clear is kind, like, that rules everything I do.”
Because when there’s confusion, when there’s conflict, sometimes it’s only because people are confused on what they’re supposed to do.
Expectations are unclear, and so people make up a lot of, you know, stories around if they don’t have clear, concrete information to work with.
So that is what John is doing this week.
I will have to let you know how it goes, but I have every confidence that my client, John, will do an amazing job because he has a great heart, a big heart for this work, a big heart for the people that he works with and the partners in his building, and that it’s all gonna work out.
So I just wanted to share that conversation with you, and I hope it helps you today know that there’s always another difficult conversation to have, but you can always think about your guiding star being clear is kind, and asking for what you really want so that you can protect the organization and the people within it, and build the healthiest culture possible.
Closing
All right. That’s the show for today.
Always remember you are meant for great things, and you don’t have to burn out to prove it.
Make sure you go back to the earliest episodes of Nonprofit CEO Spark so that you can have inter- incremental learning, and, um, go to any episode that you think w- will help you in the moment.
And I’m always here with you if you need me. I’m at marcia@nullculturecares.com. Bye
Thanks for listening to today’s episode of Nonprofit CEO Spark. If you’re ready to turn burnout into boundaries and build a healthy, happy culture where everyone, including you, can thrive, visit culturecares.com to learn how I support nonprofit organizations like yours.
If this episode brought you value, share it with a fellow leader navigating stress and overwhelm.
And remember, you are meant for great things, and you don’t have to burn out to prove it. Until next time, keep leading with courage and confidence
