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: 803
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.
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.
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
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?
Thank you for the feedback! I look forward to chatting with you!
Thanks for catching that! I’ve updated it.
Thank you! We’re enjoying her :)
There’s nothing stopping clients from going straight to EASE—that’s part of why we make it publicly available: we want people to have easy access to qualified professionals. However, there are a few scenarios in which we can help:They’re not exactly sure what type of service they need, what to ask for, and what to expect from the engagement; I often find people asking for one thing when they really need another. We’ll help them navigate that.
There are multiple service providers and they’re not sure who to choose
We do have relationships with many more service providers—the ones on EASE are just the ones that have worked with EA clients before and are familiar (or part of) the space
So that’s why we make the matchmaking service free. It’s an easy way to provide value and make sure orgs get the right support.
I do hope that over time, we’ll have enough trust from the community that our opinion will matter!
For any partners who work at similar organizations, their arrangement with their employers is their own affair; if they’re working full time there, they’re doing other work on the side (although I believe that the majority of the professionals have their own businesses).
Fiscal sponsorship and/or operations support go a really long way in bridging the gap between ideation and implementation, especially when the majority of executive directors don’t have management experience. I highly support these types of services!
Looking at this from a systemic perspective, I wonder how we can prevent this situation from happening again. To clarify, the situation I refer to is intense criticism presented without consideration of the facts that requires significant resources to be directed towards defense in order to maintain credibility.
Writing and responding to discrediting posts consumes a lot of resources that counterfactually could have been used for more impactful purposes.
Additionally, it creates a lot of fear—I can only imagine the distress this situation caused Kat and NL. It takes a lot of personal strength and conviction to stand up to such negativity, and I fear that this kind of whistleblowing is more likely to push people away from doing the hard job of being a nonprofit entrepreneur.
I’d love to hear any suggestions about how to prevent this from happening again.
I completely agree with this. I’ve seen many worse scenarios play out in other organizations due to unprofessionalism, mostly due to lack of experience and the tendency to bootstrap and work in startup mode. While that approach is helpful in some cases, it causes a lot of dysfunction across many organizations and I’d like to see more efforts put into instituting professional norms within EA organizations. This is only a well publicized event—there are many worse ones that I’ve witnessed that aren’t highlighted here. But that brings up another point that a few other commenters mentioned—are we creating an environment that: A) encourages the “move fast and break things” lack of professionalism approach But then: B) condemns them for making mistakes It seems to me that we cannot believe both. Either we supposed the first approach and accept that mistakes will be made, or we do not tolerate mistakes, but then discourage unprofessionalism. That, it seems to me, is the systemic issue surrounding this particular one.
Thanks for bringing that up. The copy is in the newsletter—we have a lot of great providers, and it’s hard to get the formatting right here also, so we just direct everyone to the place where all the information is. Did you take a look at the link?
There are so many things wrong with this post that I’m not entirely sure where to start. Here are a few key thoughts on this:
-EA preaches rationalism. As part of rationalism, to understand something truly, you need to investigate both sides of the argument. Yet the author specifically decided to only look at one side of the argument. How can that possibly be a rationalist approach to truth-seeking? If you’re going to write a defamation article about someone, especially in EA, please make sure to go about it with the logical rigor you would give any issue.
-I’ve been working with Kat and Nonlinear for years now and I heard about the hiring process, the employment issues, and the nasty separation. I can guarantee you from my perspective as a coach that a good number of the items mentioned here are abjectly false. I think the worst mistake Kat made was to not have a contract in writing with both of her employees (Chloe’s agreement was in writing) detailing the terms of their work engagement.
-I’m not seeing information collected from other Nonlinear employees, which makes me wonder why there’s a biased sample data here. Again, if you’re spending the amount of time and effort as was put into this post to defame someone, choose an appropriate data sample.
-Have you ever been through or seen people go through a divorce? Nasty splits happen all the time, and the anger can cloud retrospective judgment. Yet when we hear someone complain about how bad their ex was, we take it with a grain of salt and assume that personal prejudice is clouding their impression of the person (which is usually true). Why isn’t that factor taken into account?
-In general, I think it’s not a good idea to live with the people you work with. It destroys relationships. So it probably wasn’t a good position to start with. I’m not surprised it went sour—how often do people not have great relationships with their roommates? And when you compound that with a built-in hierarchy of employee and boss, it can make it more challenging. It’s possible Alice and Chloe didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. But that brings me back to Kat’s mistake of not getting it in writing for both of them. Their mistake does not give them an excuse for libel.
Honestly, I’m very disappointed in the author for writing a non-rigorous, slanderous accusation of an organization that does a whole lot of good, especially when I know firsthand that it’s false. It makes me lose faith in the integrity of the rationalist community.
To me, a fellowship implies a higher degree of training and involvement than just a course. It’s a combination of education and experience, and it seems to me to be the best word for it. And yes, the fact that it’s something EAs tend to understand easily makes it a better word to use for that purpose. But I’m open for suggestions if you have better ones!
I like that phone metaphor better.… I think I’ll switch to that! Thanks for the idea.
Thanks for posting this—in my sessions with varying EA orgs, I’m finding myself trying to prove the point of why they should be investing in branding and marketing as an effective way to increase funding potential and impact. In order to function like a non-profit not exclusive to EA funding, this is vital for the organization’s survival. I’ll definitely refer people back here as it comes up!
Do you have any insight into what type of efforts these funds are allocated towards?
I think you’re quite right—and if we’re going to port it over to the analogy, I would venture to say that if you know you’re I’m going to need to run a high resource task at some point, you need to conserce capacity to be able to extend the limits as needed. I don’t normally need to process and analyze gigabytes of data, but I need the ability to be able to on my device.
Not yet, no. That comes next, once we have the articles of incorporation.
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!