How Nonprofit Leaders Can Facilitate Better Decision Making

Informed decision making can help your nonprofit grow and support your workforce—here’s how to improve yours.

Decision-making is a major part of daily life for nonprofit leaders. Whether at home, work, or in our communities, our days are filled with decisions that can impact everything from the next few moments to the next several years.

When we think about the time and energy that goes into making informed decisions, as well as the time spent revisiting our choices and changing our minds, it's clear that improving the way we consistently make and reinforce decisions can reduce stress and frustration, improve team dynamics, and reclaim more time to fulfill our missions/goals.

On top of that, having open, inclusive conversations about how decisions are made can help the whole team prepare for big decisions and manage day-to-day ones more effectively.

Identify your decision-making style

The first step in making better decisions is understanding your own decision-making style as a leader. Each of us may use different styles depending on the setting, the specific situation, and the magnitude of the decision being made.

To begin understanding your own style, start by asking yourself a few key questions about how you make decisions at work. Choose a recent decision, and keep it in mind while you answer the following questions:

1. How much information do I need and what format do I prefer? Do you prefer written reports with significant research so you can review them on your own time, or would you rather have a staff member pitch you an idea?

2. Who do I want to hear from and what do I want them to share? Which staff members and supporters provide valuable insight? Do you want their recommendations, or would you rather they provide facts and observations so you can draw your own conclusions?

3. Whose counsel matters most to me before I can make this decision? Is there someone like your board chair, CFO, or another trusted adviser you need buy-in from, or do you prefer to keep your own counsel?

4. How do I get to yes? Ultimately, what is it that makes you say yes to a decision? Do you instinctually decide based on the information available to you, or do you rely heavily on data and analysis to point you to the answer?

Answering these questions and communicating your resulting needs to your team can save time and lead to more efficient decisions by setting clear expectations, reducing unnecessary work, and improving transparency into how decisions are made.

Define key decisions

For growing nonprofits, a secret to scaling successfully is ensuring that key decisions are made strategically and consistently throughout your organization. That’s because an organization’s strategy is a set of decisions you believe will help you achieve your vision.^[1]

When all decisions are elevated to the level of the executive team or CEO, it slows down decision-making, frustrates leadership and staff, and robs time that could be used on strategic initiatives and growth-related endeavors.

To create a repeatable and sustainable decision-making process, start by sorting decisions into categories. These should be based on differentiators that make sense to you and your team, such as:

• Frequency. Is this decision made on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis?

• Magnitude. Is this a standard decision made routinely, a substantial decision that requires more discussion, or a strategy-shifting decision that affects multiple parts of the organization and could represent a departure from the current direction?

• Organizational area. Does this primarily affect one department, or are many different departments involved?

After completing this initial sorting, you can begin looking for types of decisions that—if addressed with clear guidance—could save your team a lot of time and energy.

For example, a documented approach to standard, weekly decisions can empower staff to handle these scenarios more confidently and efficiently. You may also want to consider tackling any questions that seem to come up on a regular basis, as team members might need more clarity or guidance on your preferred approach in such areas.

Identify decision-makers and key players

Now, it’s time to identify a decision-maker, as well as important roles for other team members who need to weigh in on decisions.

For smaller organizations, it may be as simple as naming the one person who is responsible for making each decision in the category you’re examining.

So, if the decision is about which donors to reach out to this week, the development director is the decision-maker. Or, if the decision is about the deadline for applications to a new program, the program manager is responsible for that decision.

For larger or more complex organizations, it can be helpful to use an existing project or decision-making framework, such as RACI/DACI or RAPID^[2], to clearly identify key players.

Establishing clear roles and understanding the responsibilities of those roles can reduce interpersonal challenges that arise when your team isn’t clear on who gets to make a decision, and why.

Document decision guidance and communicate decision outcomes

For decision-makers and team members to effectively make and carry out decisions, be sure to document any specific guidance in a user-friendly way. Twenty-page policies may be difficult for team members to digest and deliver on consistently, so ask your team what the best, most useful formats for decision guidance are.

Let's look at a simple example of how to document decision guidance. For organizations with several layers of leadership or complex decisions, tools such as a process map that notes key decisions or decision trees may be helpful.

As you can see in this example, decision guidance empowers the program manager to make firm decisions that are in line with senior leadership’s vision and priorities. This guidance also explains what the program manager does once the decision is made.

This could be moving on to the next relevant workflow (e.g., notifying applicants and assigning a case manager) or communicating the decision to others who need to know the results (e.g., populating an existing dashboard where key metrics are tracked and forwarding to teams for other programs the applicant may be eligible for).

The benefits of documenting decision guidance and communicating decision outcomes include:

1. Decide once, deliver repeatedly. Rather than having to figure out how to handle new applicants each time, the sample guidance above allows program managers to follow a proven decision formula. Uncertainty is removed, as the decision about how to handle this scenario has been made and can be consistently replicated.

2. Clear criteria. Documenting the parameters for a specific decision means it can be carried out by anyone with access to the guidance. If the program manager is out on extended leave, someone else on the team can fill in. And as new staff are onboarded, they have access to the correct steps to keep decisions consistent and strategically aligned across your nonprofit.

3. Build trust and efficiency. Naming and documenting key decisions (and their outcomes) with the input of the most-involved staff ensures everyone understands leadership’s perspective, sees how all parts of their organization fit together, and understands their critical role in advancing the organization’s work/mission. Transparency and communication build trust and confidence in your new decision-making system.

4. Reclaim time. All of this leads to a reduction in repetitive or unnecessary meetings, long email chains where decisions remain murky, and drawn-out decision timelines.

Making better decisions allows your nonprofit to grow

Clear guidance, transparent decision criteria, and streamlined decision-making processes can have a huge return for your nonprofit. As you implement guidance for key decisions, be sure to practice the process and guidance you’ve laid out, and to support and reinforce the choices made by the decision-makers you’ve designated.

Consistent application of decision guidance applies to you as a leader as well, so be sure you’re ready to comply with the designated process and support your team in this new way of working.