I help organizations run effectively through operations coaching, workflow optimization, and talent development. I gain a lot of personal satisfaction from making other people’s work lives more productive, satisfying, and under control. On a personal note, I’m a mom with 4 kids juggling life, work, family, and community involvement.
Deena Englander
Karma: 799
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I love this—I would love to see more people taking action, and more funding dollars directed towards action. Research is less impactful now—now we need to do things that can make a change, and there are a variety of ways to make that happen.
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I think you’re totally on target with your thought—being an effective operator is very different than being an effective entrepreneur. They need each other. I personally always think operations and efficiency should be a part of the conversation (not just in growth mode), but by design needs to involve someone other than the entrepreneur to implement it.
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Here’s the link to the summary and updates
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Er4duMaar9u8mju4Y/fundraising-and-marketing-webinar-recap-the-takeaways-from?utm_campaign=post_share&utm_source=link
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I totally agree, based on the information you’ve provided. I’m happy to chat about the right career path for you if you’d like!
The typical growth of an operations specialist from an associate to more senior usually involves more responsibility and oversight. The trajectory starts off very micro, and over time shifts slowly into more macro positions, overseeing others who are doing the micro work. But, if need be, they’re capable of doing the micro work as well. The experience climbing the operations career ladder means that they’ve been in all the more junior roles, so they have the skills and know how to delegate and oversee those beneath them. The highest form of this is overseeing all the operations to actualize the mission of the organization. The chain usually goes from ops associate → ops manager → ops director → COO, with each level becoming more macro and having more oversight.
Regarding the Chief of Staff position, that is one title that can mean almost anything… it’s so ambiguous that I try to stay away from it myself. I think it was potentially intended to be instead of “HR director”, and now that people are trying to avoid using the term HR, they use Chief of Staff instead. To me, a true Chief of Staff is responsible for overseeing all things people—HR, benefits, payroll, hiring, firing, performance management and mentoring. What it’s actually become varies greatly from org to org; sometimes it’s a glorified executive assistant, and sometimes it’s an unacknowledged COO or operations manager. I’m not really sure why people like to stick the label of “Chief of Staff” on almost anything… maybe it sounds more exciting to potential candidates? In those scenarios, it might be an ops role in disguise.
Would you agree with that?
I so love seeing this post—I’m thrilled with the direction Coefficient Giving is going in. I strongly agree with the part about funding service providers; that’s the biggest bottleneck to organizational success (and why I founded WorkStream Nonprofit). Org leaders commonly don’t know:
- what norms they should be following
- what type of expertise they should be requesting and paying for
- whether it’s responsible to use funder dollars to pay for these supporting services.
Between all of that, they’re not engaging with the right kind of (or any) support, and that significantly hurts impact. (See my past post on operational norms.)
I think that you, as funders, are the best positioned to help encourage best practices amongst your grantees, and I’m loving that you’re making that a priority this year!