You need to say the F-word.

It’s like a sad birthday party.

You’re wearing the hat. People sing. You blow out the candles. But deep down you know something’s not right.

Sometimes we celebrate things that are merely ok (or worse).

In 2021, YouVersion’s Bible App passed half a billion devices. The team celebrated. Bobby Gruenewald, YouVersion’s founder and CEO, told me how he felt, on this week’s episode of The Nonprofit CEO Podcast.

We were celebrating this and it just felt very hollow. Because I knew behind the scenes, even though the numbers are big, the actual growth rate and the rate at which we’re growing was just above flat.

He told his closest advisors something had to change: “I felt like this is just not proper stewardship.”

We look around at each other, saying, “We’ve done well…right?” (You may remember this theme in my article The Niceness Trap.)

I have this conversation with a lot of CEOs. Too often, we are slow or unwilling to simply say the F-word: “This is a failure.”

The party takes different forms.

• An award. Peter Greer’s HOPE International won an award for its work in a post-conflict setting, and every number looked good. In Episode 10, he said, “If you grow without underlying quality, all that means is you’ve got a bigger mess on your hands.”
• A false virtue. World Renew grew for years with a flat leadership structure, and Carol Bremer-Bennett says they were proud of it. “Everybody owned everything, and nobody owned anything.” (Episode 24)
• Big speakers at your event. A CEO new to his organization inherited expensive donor events with big-name speakers. “I have shut that down. People aren’t happy with me, but I shut it down because of bad return on investment.”
• Momentum. Another CEO took his board a plan to slow down. “Even though we could launch [more] locations, that feels like it would actually be detrimental.”

Greer named why we miss it:

We love—in the nonprofit space—to talk about all the successes, to show graphs that are up into the right. And I think that what that can unintentionally do is miss out on the identification of things that aren’t working, of learning from failure, as one of our greatest teachers.

We’ve wasted resources. We’ve made a decision, and it hasn’t gone our way. We are on the wrong path. We don’t want to admit it.

Sometimes a crisis forces us to say the F-word. At Social Current, Jody Levison-Johnson saw it happen, from Episode 7:

There were programs we had always done, and it wasn’t until the funding was in jeopardy that we were revisiting them.

In Episode 9, Tami Heim of CLA described what a crisis makes possible:

The pain of that moment enables ministry leaders to think the unthinkable. Cause you’ll go there. You won’t go there when you’re comfortable.

A sad birthday party is rarely a crisis. But it might be hiding one. Nothing forces the question, so the organization needs the CEO to ask it.

If not, the organization remains satisfied with activity rather than outcomes for the people we serve. We do less than we could or should.

Will Jones of Thompson put the question plainly in Episode 32:

How do you know you’ve been successful? Well, you know, it feels good and the donors are happy and volunteers are happy. But what’s the goal?

One CEO of a global ministry told me about his own staff:

There’s a lot of congratulations for having 7000 listeners to the podcast, when I think it should be tens or hundreds of thousands.

Doesn’t this scandalize us? Don’t we want better, for the people we serve? And better requires us to sometimes (or even frequently) say, “This is a failure.” 

Pull the plug. Come clean. Drop the farce. Stop pretending. Say what you know. (I previously wrote about this dynamic in Killing Your Sacred Hows.)

Some flat lines are fine. Bobby’s case rested on a specific read of the need:

I really felt like we were not at a saturation point. The need for what we were doing is so massively bigger than than what where we were.

Naming it can feel costly. Greer expected to lose donors when he told them a growth plan had failed. “I thought that was going to be the end of these relationships. And the exact opposite happened.”

From that point, you can begin to make the necessary changes. You run a post-mortem. You reallocate resources. You find the help you need. You design new experiments. And then you can find the next thing.

Years before the hollow milestone, Bobby shut down YouVersion’s first website just three months in. “I really felt like it’s important to actually label something as a failure so that you can actually learn from it.”

Greer’s donors asked him the same thing: “So what have you learned? What are you going to do differently? And how can we continue to support you?”

To get to that new terrain, you need to acknowledge failure. You need to say the F-word.

Thank you for what you’re leading.

Adam Jeske, The Nonprofit CEO Advisor

P.S. What are you celebrating that might actually be a failure? What’s the thing you know you need to acknowledge?

Please send me your thoughts. They’re vital as I write Peerless: Nonprofit CEOs and the Decisions They Carry Alone.