424: One Clear Outcome Can Change Everything with Dr. Tracy Baynes

There is a moment most executive directors know.

A funder is hinting at money for a new initiative. A long-time staff member is pushing for an expansion. A community partner is asking whether you can serve a new population. Your inbox holds three more open questions just like these. Everyone is well-intentioned. Every option has a case.

You close your laptop on a Friday and feel the weight of having to decide.

This is the kind of tired most nonprofit leaders carry. It is not the tired of doing too much work. It is the tired of having too many decisions with nothing underneath them to settle the question.

The truth is, you are not overwhelmed because there are too many options. You are overwhelmed because nothing in your organization is sharp enough to make the right option obvious.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Dr. Tracy Baynes, the founder of STEP, a college access and leadership program in Arizona that has been running for 21 years. It sharpened how I think about what actually creates calm in a nonprofit leader's day. The ideas weren't new to me. What was new was hearing them explained as the source of clarity that lets a 21-year-old organization keep running without drama.

Tracy can tell you in one sentence what STEP exists to produce. She can tell you who STEP is for. She can tell you how she would know, years from now, whether STEP worked for any given student. (I've written more on the "how would you know" piece in 3 Tips For Measuring Your Impact.)

She is not carrying every decision alone. She is holding every decision up against one clear outcome and letting the outcome answer.

That is the difference. Most nonprofit leaders are running organizations that have a mission and a set of programs and a vague sense of impact. Tracy is running an organization that has a specific outcome.

• A mission is a direction. An outcome is a destination.

• A direction lets you go almost anywhere. A destination tells you which turn to take.

• When you have a specific outcome, every "should we?" question has an answer already built into it.

This is the upstream decision. Make this one well, and the next dozen get easier.

Right now, when someone proposes a new program, you weigh it on instinct, politics, funder interest, and gut feeling. You hold it up against nothing in particular. Which is why the decision is hard.

When you have a specific outcome, you hold the proposed program up against it and ask one question: does this move us closer to producing that outcome, or does it not?

Most ideas don't survive that question. The ones that do, you can move on quickly. The ones that don't, you can decline without guilt, without long deliberation, and without losing sleep.

The "should we add this?" noise quiets because there is finally something underneath the question that knows the answer. (For more on why this discipline is harder than it sounds, see Focus Is Not Optional.)

• Without a specific outcome, every new program idea is a debate.

• With a specific outcome, most ideas answer themselves in under a minute.

• The weight you carry from program decisions is mostly the weight of deciding without an anchor.

Funders are not avoiding your organization because they don't care. They are avoiding it because they cannot tell exactly what they would be funding.

A mission statement is not a thing they can invest in. A list of programs is not a thing they can invest in. "Impact" is not a thing they can invest in.

A specific outcome is.

When you can sit across from a funder and say, "We exist to produce this specific change in the lives of these specific people, and here is how we know whether we are," the conversation changes. They can finally see what their money would do. They can finally compare what you do to what other organizations do. They can finally say yes for real reasons instead of soft ones.

• Funders cannot fund what they cannot see clearly.

• A specific outcome is the only thing they can actually compare and decide on.

• When the outcome is clear, you stop having to convince and start having to show.

The leaders I know who have made this shift tell me the same thing. Funding conversations went from exhausting to almost mechanical. The fundraising skill didn't change. What changed was that there was finally something concrete on the table.

Here is what changes for the leader who actually does this work.

The decisions stop piling up in your head. The staff conversations get more productive. The funder pitches get easier to write. The donors get easier to find and keep. The programs that don't belong stop demanding attention because they no longer have a way to make the case.

• The mental weight of constant decision-making drops.

• The work starts to feel like it is moving in one direction instead of in five.

• You stop being the only person who can hold the whole organization in your head, because the outcome holds it for you.

This isn't more discipline. It is less, because you only need discipline in one place: protecting the clarity of the outcome itself.

This isn't about doing less work.

It's about doing work that knows where it's going.

A specific outcome is not a planning exercise. It is the upstream decision that quiets every downstream one.

Make it well, and the next year stops feeling like a series of impossible choices. It starts feeling like a series of obvious ones.

That is what Tracy has at 21 years. That is what you can have too.

Tracy Baynes is the Founder and CEO of STEP: Student Expedition Program (STEP College-Prep) –a college access and leadership program for low-income Arizona high-school students. She received her doctorate in oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1993. After several years as a coral reef researcher at the University of Miami and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Tracy turned her full focus to teaching in 1996. She joined Columbia University's Biosphere 2 Center to teach in their undergraduate program. She later taught and developed college-level field courses for Sea Education Association, University of Pittsburgh, Long Island University, University of Montana, and Prescott College. 

From 2001 to 2004, Tracy developed an international ship-based ocean semester on the West Coast for Long Island University.  In 2004, Tracy founded STEP's College-Prep and Leadership Program with the focused mission of educating and empowering low-income Arizona high-school students to enroll in and graduate from college. 

Connect with Tracy

https://www.stepexpedition.org

https://www.instagram.com/stepcollegeprep

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracybaynesstep/:

  STEP College-Prep & Leadership Program

Donate to STEP

National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS)

Also ...  check out this video compilation of seniors opening their acceptance emails - it is 3 minutes of pure joy!