A client recently used the following phrase when discussing the challenge of being an Executive Director.
“I’m constantly juggling balls. Too many to keep in the air. The key is knowing which balls are glass and which balls are plastic.”
I loved the metaphor and doing some online sleuthing believe it originated with the author Norah Roberts, who used it to discuss the challenge of being a successful writer and raising kids
I’ve thought about the metaphor and would like to suggest several implications for how a nonprofit leader should approach their work.
Bottom line: there are steps you can take to be an excellent nonprofit juggler who rarely (or never) drops a glass ball.
About the Metaphor
The metaphor is pretty self-explanatory. Drop a glass ball and it shatters. Drop a plastic ball and it doesn’t. The plastic ones can be retrieved and picked back up if necessary, or perhaps kicked out of the way if unnecessary.
Glass balls are your tasks where mishandling them would have significant consequences. Plastic balls, in contrast, might be annoying to “drop,” but the consequences would be comparatively minor.
Of course, if you’re a nonprofit Executive Director (or anywhere in nonprofit management), you’re not just juggling your own balls. You’re also setting in motion members of your team (at least those you supervise) to juggle their own balls.
So even as you have to scan the balls to make sure your own glass balls don’t drop, you also have to be cognizant of who among your team has glass balls that are at risk of being dropped.
Of course, you might say: “well the answer is to just never drop a ball.” And I’d say: “good luck with that.” Seriously, I’ve never seen an executive doing their job who isn’t consistently faced with triaging tasks to either let them go entirely or to push them off to some future date.
Distinguishing Glass from Plastic Balls
As you scan your tasks, identify which ones are glass.
Here are some examples of glass balls:
- Key activities for mission-critical programs. If these go awry, it would significantly detract from your mission impact.
- Activities where failure could seriously harm the reputation of the organization, thus threatening its future funding.
- Key donor relationships. Work to maintain those relationships can be thought of as a series of glass balls. Plus, activities of the organization that any of your very top donors particularly prioritize.
- Financial oversight, to some extent. Not every task within your fiscal management system represents a glass ball. But collectively, ensuring reasonably accurate, reasonably timely financial reporting definitely would count.
- Losing top-notch staff. Dropping balls that could cause your top staff to leave would fit in this category, as would loading up those staff with so many balls of their own that they feel compelled to leave.
Dropping these glass balls can lead to irreversible damage, loss of trust, financial instability, or failure to advance the mission.
What are your plastic balls?
They can be important too, but failure (or neglect of them) won’t be so harmful.
- Many minor administrative tasks would fit into this.
- Meetings where your participation would be nice, but is not essential.
- Minor events. You want these to happen, and of course you want them to go well, but if you have to either cancel them or let them go forward in a middling way, there’s no permanent harm.
How to avoid dropping glass balls
Here are a handful of strategies to consider:
1. Don’t juggle so many balls!
This may seem obvious, but it’s easy to overlook.
Use work plans to lay out what tasks you’re taking on and don’t commit to activities that are beyond what’s realistic. If something emerges new, can you safely offload something else (in our metaphor, catch a plastic ball and either hand it over to another juggler to handle)?
This applies not just to you, but also the people you manage and their balls. Don’t establish expectations that are unrealistic. That’s hard to do unless you require some level of work planning by them from which you can help them assess and manage their work and workload.
2. Don’t try to make the perfect throw every time
Juggling (literal juggling, not metaphorical) is something I learned to do at a summer camp as a teenager. One of the things I had to learn was to get the basics down of the throwing motion, but not be so focused on the perfect throw that I wasn’t simultaneously able to track where the other balls were and prepare to catch/throw them.
Perfectionism is a common failing that many people face when it comes to how they approach tasks. As a nonprofit leader, I often found that I could accomplish 90% of the benefit of a task at 60% of the time necessary. The remaining 40% of the time might get me to perfection, but that time was unavailable for other projects.
3. Use technology/tools to track your balls
In the real world, juggling balls blindfolded is beyond challenging.
Yet, I sometimes see nonprofit leaders who aren’t blindfolding themselves, but are definitely hamstringing themselves by not continually tracking and planning for their tasks.
Just last year I was asking a nonprofit leader how they organized their work day/week and pretty much it was: I show up to work, do what’s in my calendar, and respond to emails. I wasn’t surprised to hear that balls were being dropped.
Back in the olden days when I was an Executive Director in the late 1990s, I relied on a paper “Franklin Planner” (bonus points for anyone who remembers those!) to keep meticulous notes around to-dos, organized within major categories and tied to a calendar.
As soon as possible, I gravitated to computer solutions, which at first for me were Excel spreadsheets that I used to keep track of the “balls” and could identify those that were critical. I didn’t know the glass/plastic ball analogy, but I behaved like I did by bolding some spreadsheet rows to emphasize their importance.
About 15 years ago, I moved to online project management systems. For the last 5 years I’ve been very dependent on Asana. I use it to plan and track projects, activities within those projects, sub-tasks within the activities, etc. I use priority-level settings to identify my “glass balls” as a consultant.
Every day begins by looking at what I have to-do. When any task is completed, I return to Asana to mark it done and immediately create any new follow-up tasks that are appropriate. When I agree to take on new projects or tasks, I’m in Asana within a day or two laying out the tasks needed on a timeline.
I’m not telling you to be as relentless in using a tool like this as I am. But you need to have some tool and don’t just use it half-heartedly.
Bottom line: if you’re not consciously identifying your balls and tracking their flight, you’re a lot more likely to drop one.
4. Consciously remove or let drop balls, particularly plastic ones
As a nonprofit leader, you should be regularly identifying plastic balls (or even glass!) that you can catch and hand over to someone else on your team.
Some balls you may not be able to delegate, but if you’re feeling out of control, you can still consciously catch the ball and instead of immediately rethrowing it as a juggler, you can set it on the counter next to you, to be picked up later.
Of course, some balls are still dropped. That’s okay. When a ball does drop, it’s important to be aware of it, though, so you can perhaps kick it off to the side in a deliberate manner, so it doesn’t get underfoot and trip you up.
Whether you’re temporarily setting a ball aside or dropping/kicking it off to the side, be sure and communicate to anyone else who had expectations you’d complete something that it’s going to be delayed. (Note: some technology tools make this really easy!).
5. Recognize that some plastic balls can turn into glass
The same task may change on you over time. Board recruitment at a time you have a really strong board may be plastic as a ball, but if you neglect the task for too long, it may become glass as your board strength deteriorates.
So don’t just think about the relative level of importance of tasks as you take them on initially, but rather have some sort of process on a periodic basis (quarterly?) to spend a few hours taking a harder look at your overall work plan and see if anything needs more attention than you had originally envisioned.
6. Get help learning how to be a better juggler
You can juggle more balls if you’re a better juggler. And some of that is just practice.
But you can also get training to be better and handle more. Sometimes finding time to get professional development is absolutely worthwhile to be a more effective juggler.
In my early years as an Executive Director, I had the benefit of a lot of training thanks to a national organization with which we were affiliated. Those trainings absolutely set me up for greater levels of success, even as the time spent at the training meant I had to juggler fewer balls in the short-run (setting some aside).
Where the metaphor breaks down
I think the analogy breaks down, in part, because it may lead you to focus too much on the urgent things (that seem like glass balls), while plastic balls that are really important get neglected.
Paul Covey in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People wrote about a time management technique that divides tasks into four quadrants. One axis is urgent versus non-urgent, with urgency about time sensitivity. The other quadrant is important versus non-important.
The challenge for some executives is they fail to work on things that are important, but not urgent. Because of the lack of time sensitivity, you may feel the ball isn’t glass. Or you may see the ball is really high in the air so there’s just plenty of time to get to it.
Even as you think about the glass v. plastic ball metaphor, I’d encourage you to also recognize that some types of relationship-building, planning, etc. represent a series of activities that may individually be “plastic” balls, but collectively they are “glass.” Drop one or two, no biggie. Drop most or all, that’s big.
So recognize that you can’t just focus on this one management technique, but apply it in the context of others that make sure you’re focusing on the right things.
Feedback
As always, please share your thoughts on this metaphor or techniques you use to either distinguish between more important and less important tasks or to avoid “dropping glass balls.”
