You Can’t Lead from Quicksand - Why Foundational Clarity is the First Job of Every Leader

Almost every new leader remembers a moment early in their tenure when they were asked to respond to a need, problem, or other external force, and they felt like they were in a whirlwind with no clear path forward. And most people who have led for a long time know that they are able to make a decision regarding a similar situation fairly easily, with little anxiety. Why is that? Is it because the seasoned leader has had longer to learn and has gained wisdom and knowledge? Yes, to some degree, but it’s also because they have foundational clarity. 

As leaders, we are told to be visionary and bold, but no one tells us that there are things we need to have nailed down before we CAN be visionary. A leader may be incredibly smart and quick-witted, but without a deep understanding of their organization's foundations, they will never be as effective as someone who has done that work. Having foundational clarity is what sets a leader and their organization up for success. 

Foundational clarity isn’t certainty. It doesn’t mean you are all-seeing or know the outcomes, but it does mean you are firmly anchored to the bedrock ideals of your organization, which makes it easier to stand firm in any storm. Essentially, clarity is how you orient yourself in the world; certainty is knowing the outcomes. True certainty is hard to come by, but orientation around and on your foundations is available to everyone. You aren’t just familiar with it; you have breathed it in and incorporated it into your belief system so much that every decision you make grows from that. This is a critical factor for any leader, but especially for nonprofit leaders whose organizations are built on bedrock concepts like mission and values. Let’s see what that looks like in practice. 

The Foundational Clarity Model

When thinking about leading an organization, we can imagine a clarity continuum in layers that begins with a true understanding of mission and values, which are clear and solid. It then moves to the next level of clarity, which includes financials, staff, board, community needs, and culture. Next comes strategy, partnerships, timing, and leadership capacity. And, finally, external forces like chance, luck, and other forces that you can navigate but never control. I like to use a tree as a metaphor for these layers.

The Bedrock

An organization’s mission and values should always form the foundation of everything it produces and offers. It is the “why”. The beginning and the end. The alpha and the omega. An organization’s mission should be clear in every staff member's and board member’s mind. Values are also part of that bedrock. They signal to everyone the beliefs that shape the organization and are a key part of organizational culture. When a leader has bedrock clarity, they are able to hold fast to the organization's mission and values even when confronted with external pressures to deviate from them. 

A great example is a leader presented with a revenue source misaligned with the organization’s mission. Lack of clarity around the mission might allow that leader to move towards that revenue source and away from the mission. Mission drift is detrimental to a nonprofit organization because it shows everyone that the mission isn’t foundational. However, a leader fully committed to the mission would forgo that revenue source, thereby keeping the organization’s foundation strong. 

This layer must be clearest to the organization’s leader, as well as to staff, the board, volunteers, and the wider community. 

The Roots

The next layer of clarity includes financials, staff, board, community needs, leadership capacity, and organizational culture. This layer is usually less clear than the first, but it must still be understood to a high degree to keep the leader and organization grounded when working with more ambiguous layers.

• Financial: Do you fully understand your organization’s financial situation? The budget, investments, donors in the pipeline, delayed maintenance, how regular salary increases will affect the budget, and the need for increased income should all be clearly understood. 

  
  

• Staff - Are the staff aligned with the mission? What are their skill sets and capacities? Is there bandwidth for increased effort, or are they hitting the ceiling? 

  
  

• Board - Is the board aligned with the mission? Are they engaged and active beyond the regular meetings? Are they helping to raise funds? Do you have new board members in the pipeline? Is your board diverse enough to represent the community you serve? 

  
  

• Community Need - What is the community asking from you? Are you meeting the need? Have you identified additional services you could provide, given the means? Are you aligned with what the community wants and what you want to support?

  
  

• Leadership Capacity -  Clarity about your capacity as a leader is only as good as the work you have done to know yourself. Knowing your capacity allows you to bring in help in the form of additional staff or consultants that will allow you to work sustainably for the long term. Are you operating at a sustainable pace, or are you already over capacity and unwilling to admit it?

  
  

• Organizational Culture - Does the organization’s culture encourage excellence while providing a safe environment for the risk required to attain that excellence? Are staff supportive of each other? Is there cross-department work, or are departments working independently of each other? 

The Tree

Our next layer of clarity includes strategy, partnerships, timing, and potential leadership capacity. These areas involve more elements that are harder to control and inherently more ambiguous. We can control strategy only to the extent we understand the situation, and partnerships include people from outside the organization whose values and mission may align fully or only partially. Timing can fluctuate wildly based on numerous factors, and clarity about what you need to build and acquire to create more leadership capacity requires deep work. 

Clarity about the strategy you want to use will help you determine how you want to engage partners and the timing required to achieve a goal. Spending time considering your actual capacity for work, whether you are reaching the limit or have already gone over, will help you keep from overreaching more, burning out, and losing your edge and your health. The best thing you can do for yourself and your organization is to be honest about what you can and can’t accomplish.  

The Weather

The last level of clarity isn’t clear at all. I call it the weather because it is uncontrollable and shifting, bringing many forces you will be required to navigate. Forces like chance, luck, and external pressures. The weather happens every day. It may rain, the sun may shine, or there could be a drought. You never know what’s coming. A global pandemic, a sudden shift in federal funding priorities, or a community crisis you couldn’t have predicted; this is the weather, and there is no way to prepare fully for things that you cannot see ahead. 

When the Tree Has No Foundation

Most leaders skip straight to the Tree and ignore the Bedrock and the Roots. Elements in the Tree are exciting BECAUSE they can’t fully be known. There is a desire to begin solving the puzzle immediately, without first determining whether the table it’s being placed on is stable. Back to the Tree metaphor, the first thing we do when planting a tree is to make sure its foundation (soil and roots) is stable and strong. Soil is packed around the roots, water is given often, and soil conditions are monitored daily. 

Time spent ensuring that you and your team are truly connected and understand the mission, values, financials, themselves, your support, and the community they serve is time very well spent.

An Honest Assessment of your Foundational Clarity

The following five questions all test honest visibility, which is what foundational clarity really demands. It doesn’t demand perfection, but the willingness to see clearly and honestly. 

1. Does your mission statement reflect what the organization is doing today or what it did when it was founded? Many organizations are operating on autopilot, either following a mission that is no longer fully relevant or drifting away from the original mission without taking time to review and modify it if necessary. Regular review of your mission and its relevance is the key to a healthy organization. 

   
   

2. If your top three staff members left tomorrow, how would the organization be affected? Would it survive, and would you know it was coming? This uncomfortable question encapsulates staff capacity, culture, and succession. It’s a test for bandwidth, resilience, and whether you have an honest visibility into retention risk. 

   
   

3. Can every person in your organization articulate the mission in their own words and make daily decisions based on it? If the answer is no, your organization isn’t as solid as it might look on paper.

   
   

4. Who are three people outside your organization who know its work best, and are they actively advocating for it? This tests for external relationships and whether they are genuinely reciprocal, and who your community champions are. 

   
   

5. Have you ever received an honest, unsolicited critique of your organization, and how did you handle it? Organizations with healthy cultures attract feedback. Leaders who listen to it and act upon it build trust. Discomfort is required for growth. 

   
   

   But on the flip side, you have to look at critique through the lens of your mission. If the critique comes from a place of not fully understanding the organization’s mission, or even devalues it, it still requires reflection, but not necessarily action.  

What this Makes Possible

Foundational clarity is not your destination. It is the launch pad for your organization to do great things in service to its mission. Spending time regularly through discussions with staff and the board, annual strategy workshops, and personal reflection on the Bedrock and Roots of your organization will result in easier, less reactive decisions, not to mention fewer ideas that are not a good match. 

When you know what’s solid, you can finally afford not to know everything.

We’ll address this concept in a follow-up blog. 

Amber Parker is the Founder and Principal Consultant at RootSpark Consulting. She has 32 years of leadership experience in government and nonprofit sectors and is ready to help you level up your organization.