Jay Strear spent 24 years in nonprofit leadership before discovering EOS. After implementing it as CEO and experiencing the transformation firsthand, he became an EOS implementer to help other organizations break through the strategic planning cycle that produces beautiful documents but limited results. We sat down with Jay to talk about his journey from nonprofit executive to EOS implementer, and why business operating systems are uniquely suited to solve the challenges nonprofits face every day.
Tell us about your career before you became an implementer.
I was a budding entrepreneur in legacy organizations. I went into the nonprofit space, specifically large historic organizations that had been around a long time. I got an MBA in nonprofit management, stayed for additional degrees including rabbinic ordination, and worked for the president of the university helping him manage a fundraising portfolio and the board of directors.
I was at American Jewish University for 24 years total and served in two primary roles. One was chief advancement officer, which in a university setting is sales and marketing. Simultaneously, for the last 10 years I was senior vice president, working hand in glove with the president on macro planning, land use, and mergers and acquisitions. Those 2008 and 2012 economic episodes really necessitated mergers amongst the nonprofit sector.
It was in that environment, and later as CEO of a statewide nonprofit for four and a half years, that I came to really wrestle with the historic or traditional ways nonprofits went about strategic planning and executing — or the lack thereof — towards those strategic objectives.
How did you discover EOS?
I had no idea what entrepreneurial best practices meant. I think I had even limited understanding of what KPIs were. When I became a nonprofit CEO, I went to lunch with a new colleague who said, “Jay, you’ve got to read Traction.” I had no idea what Traction was. I read it and thought, oh my gosh, where were all of these tools for the previous 24 years of my career?
I rushed out and bought copies of Traction and What the Heck is EOS and started handing them out to my staff. Let’s just say that wasn’t a very inclusive process. We tried and introduced tools, but there wasn’t that outside expertise acting as a teacher and facilitator of internal cultural dynamics, somebody who enabled us to wrestle with challenges to strengthen team health.
After about two years of EOS self-implementation, we brought on an EOS implementer who really understood the nonprofit environment — Amy Holtz. She became a mentor and teacher to me. I became a partner to her to think about how these tools work in a nonprofit space. We taught the tools in a pure manner, but with the board’s governance dynamic, figuring out what the board role is in setting strategy in addition to the important voices of the leadership team.
What made you realize you needed EOS? What was happening before you introduced it?
Often with a new leader, the board expects you to facilitate a strategic planning process. I had gone through five strategic planning processes at the university, and I have a particular view on that. It was a costly process — you add the senior leadership, department heads, the board, a lot of conversation over a long period of time, over an entire academic year that produced good strategic plans. I don’t criticize that process, but it was very emblematic of a type of strategic planning, and I felt given the dynamics of our environment, we needed something more iterative.
How could we create a much more rapid, much less costly approach to capturing well-informed perspectives on where the organization should go and then move? That’s what I became so attracted to with EOS. It validated the important contributions of those in the room with flexibility relative to the board and being able to capture other perspectives. But we didn’t spend a year. We spent a much shorter period of time. We put it on paper, but we didn’t concretize it.
The process of EOS is iterative. It’s a dynamic strategic planning process. We needed to move in a dynamic, challenging environment, especially because we had just gone home for COVID. How do you run a strategic planning process in the midst of COVID? EOS was the answer.
What do you see as the big differences between a traditional nonprofit strategic planning process and the EOS approach?
A traditional approach to strategic planning in the nonprofit world is bringing together lots of stakeholders, doing lots of analyses through various methodologies, rankings, SWOT analysis — all of which are of value, but it’s a slow process. Often you’re bringing stakeholders in who have high opinion and low investment, so how do you start weighing all the perspectives as opposed to putting the weight on the leadership, the professional staff, and the board to pull what they already know? More often than not, the knowledge in the room is the most informed.
The other piece is once a traditional strategic plan is on paper, it’s on paper, and that’s the map forward. What we know of EOS is yes, we put things on paper (or in an EOS software) — the Vision/Traction Organizer, the strategic plan and business plan captured by eight questions. But every quarter we review that, and every year we take a much broader, holistic view. Now you’ve built in a dynamic, iterative component every quarter and every year, such that what you write down — and often what used to sit on a shelf — has to be lived, learned, led. That’s the power of it.
How long of a view did those traditional strategic plans take?
A traditional plan was a five-year strategic planning process, and it’s hard to even imagine what five years is going to be like. It was hard 20 years ago, much less now.
With the framework of EOS, we’re still going to define that North Star. Maybe 90% of organizations, that’s 10 years. For a lot of my companies in rapidly changing environments, it’s five years, but even five years is hard to imagine.
Let’s work backwards. Let’s define that North Star, create a picture of what we need in three years, work backwards to one year, and then let’s live in 90 days, which is really where the human brain functions best.
What made you decide to become an implementer instead of returning to executive leadership?
I had the good fortune while working at a university to also teach in our graduate schools. We had an MBA for Nonprofit Management and trained nonprofit leaders throughout Southern California and the western states. I love teaching. When I thought to myself, do I want to go back into an executive role or become a consultant? Neither of those really sat well with me.
The construct of a traditional consultant is like a doctor — they come in, assess with or without leadership what the pain point is, prescribe a solution, and aren’t really involved in implementation. What I love about the EOS implementer role is I’m a teacher, so I get to lean into 30 years of teaching experience. I’m a facilitator. I’m really comfortable in painful moments — maybe because of that rabbinic training, that pastoral training, standing next to somebody in moments of pain. But I also can push, and we’ve got to be driven towards growth. Sometimes you need an outside facilitator who is capable of stepping into that danger zone, calling out what nobody else is able or willing to call out and helping a leadership team grow.
Lastly is the coach — to do the work with the leadership team and leadership team members to be better. This is about transformation at the organization level, at the department level, at the individual level. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to stand with leadership teams in a variety of organizations and environments and really be able to help them grow to be better, to amplify their impact.
What are the biggest gains for a nonprofit when they transform from traditional strategic planning into EOS?
A few very quick wins. First is the time it takes to get a strategic direction articulated. We’re not going through six or 12 months of study and work. The complete plan in its working format is done in 60 days. There’s the speed.
It’s been an inclusive process. The CEO doesn’t sit and define the plan and then get buy-in. The leadership team forms a brain trust, and we figure out the right methodology to include the board. Ultimately, the right voices are in the right conversation to articulate what becomes the right path forward in a quick, efficient manner that leads to an iterative outcome focusing everybody on executing.
What often happens in nonprofits is they become paralyzed on what the direction is. At a certain point we got to decide, we got to move, and we got to learn from what went well, what didn’t work, and adjust. Very quickly, 60 days thereafter, we’re executing, we’re measuring, we’re testing, we’re adjusting, and we’re moving forward towards that long-term objective.
How do you work with boards in the EOS implementation and planning process?
First, you can picture the EOS model — the six components and the circle in the middle that says “your business.” The organization is at the center. I don’t prescribe anything. I work with the leadership team to figure out how the board’s voice should be captured.
A board of directors is generally responsible for strategy, governance, and fiduciary oversight. If we think about the eight questions relating to the V/TO, the first five questions on the vision page pertain to strategy. For organizations that want board input on the front end, I’ll facilitate with the leadership team and the board a full day session to go through those first five questions. Then the leadership team continues on with focus day and quarterly sessions. They put their imprint, but we’re not chiseling this in stone. Whatever the adjustments and outcomes are, they go back to the board.
The other model is they do the work — focus day and quarterly sessions. They communicate to the board, and I usually meet with at least the executive committee and give them an overview. The leadership team will do the work in those sessions, and what they produce is brought back to the board for input.
Why I love this so much in the EOS for nonprofit space is it really helps delineate those arenas and eliminates a lot of the micromanagement or cross-purpose confusion.
Nonprofits often have huge, lofty missions. What are the challenges and solutions you find in bringing these back into 90-day worlds?
You just touched on one of the biggest challenges and the biggest points of reward and benefit. Most nonprofits have mission statements and vision statements that are so delusional there’s no way to actually measure consistent, longitudinal progress towards those outcomes.
First, let’s define the mission in a clear manner that everyone understands the purpose of the organization and its niche. Think about Simon Sinek’s circles. The center is why — that becomes the definition for the mission or purpose. The niche is the what. The three uniques are the how.
Let me add an additional element. We should be so fortunate as to eradicate homelessness, but no one organization is going to do that. But if you read vision statements in health and human service organizations focusing on homelessness, they’ll often say “conquer homelessness.” How about reduce homelessness by 20% in Denver County over a 10-year period? Something specific, achievable, and that would have a major impact on the community.
What EOS structure offers is a simple construct that says let’s define your vision in a SMART manner — specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. Now we can measure our progress towards that, and the totality of our efforts feed to that. I can share this with board members, with foundations. I can provide evidence of progress towards that. If we’re not able to hit those goals, we can solve those issues.
Nonprofits often struggle with accountability. What are the biggest challenges you see, and how does EOS help?
The a-word — accountability. It’s a lot easier to hold people accountable when we’ve defined their function and roles in an Accountability Chart. If an organization isn’t willing to hold people accountable, EOS is not for that leadership team. Unfortunately, that may be the case at times in a nonprofit environment. We have the challenge of cultural dynamics, and sometimes there are dynamics where people don’t want to hold people accountable because we’re mission-driven, we love one another.
Assuming the leadership team wants to hold people accountable — both professionals and volunteers — we’ve got tools that help bring about that clarity. I even encourage nonprofits that are heavily lay-driven to define the Accountability Chart with clear functions, roles, and responsibilities that enable us to hold people accountable for those components that are lay-driven, lay-run. If I’m a volunteer and I’m committing to serve in this function, now I know what’s expected of me. Now we can all succeed.
Clarity helps lead to accountability, but the leadership has to be willing to hold people accountable when they’re not fulfilling their responsibilities.
How does the accountability chart help when people are wearing multiple hats or doing cross-functional work?
I’m really passionate about the word clarity, and the accountability chart gives us the ability to build not only what is but what we want in a really clear manner.
Let’s say Samantha is sitting in three seats or five seats. Let’s define those seats and make it really known both with Samantha and ourselves that yes, Samantha can’t sit in five seats and only contribute 100% time. You only have 100% time. You’re not going to fill five seats with 150% time. Now we’ve got to come to an agreement that this one seat is actually only going to take 5 to 10% of your time, and we’re going to define the expectations and deliverables accordingly.
By fleshing all of that out so we know all the seats in as detailed a manner as we can, where does the accountability chart help? It helps in scaling or reducing. We need 100% of Samantha’s time in these two seats. What are we going to do with these other three? They’re either not going to get done, we’re going to reassign them, we’re going to hire people. Or that one seat which Samantha dedicated all this time to has proven tremendous value — we actually need to dedicate 100% of somebody’s time to that. Samantha, do you want to do that, or do we hire somebody?
Now we’ve got the mechanisms to make really informed decisions about scaling or paring back based on a very visual delineation of what’s actually happening in the organization.
Nonprofits don’t always have goals that roll up to revenue the way for-profits do. What do Scorecards and Rocks look like for nonprofits?
I like to say that nonprofit is not a business model, it’s a tax status. There is revenue. We’ve got to be clear about what revenue is — is it through grants and foundations, individual donors, government funding, endowment, fee-for-service? We’ve got to define clearly what the revenue is, and then people need to own it. It needs to be evidence of progress forward.
Then we’ve got to build Scorecards and Measurables that tie to the activities that drive those outcomes. Those outcomes may be recruitment, moving people within one area of service to another.
For a nonprofit Scorecard example, let’s say fundraising — what are the measurables that I want to hold my team accountable for?
I don’t want to find out in month 11 that that million-dollar goal for that fundraising division is $200,000 short. That would be a lagging indicator telling us what’s in the rearview mirror. I want to know what’s happening every week as it relates to the leading indicators.
I know that these three fundraising staff members need to engage in X number of donor engagements every single week, and if it drops below, we’re going to have a challenge to actually raise those dollars. If we see that Scorecard stay consistent and the dollars still aren’t coming in, maybe they’re doing the right work, but the messaging isn’t right. Maybe they don’t know how to secure those meetings.
On the front end, I want to build leading indicators to show evidence of activity that moves the function, department, or organization forward. We create that throughout — whether that’s marketing, program, fundraising. In many ways, it’s no different than a for-profit environment. The terminology may change, but we want to bring measurables down to evidence progress forward, not find out 11 months into a year that we’re $200,000 short and now we’ve got to cut services.
What was the typical meeting structure you saw in nonprofits before EOS?
Death by meeting. I surveyed staff at one point and found the average staff member was spending 22 and a half hours in meetings in a 37 and a half hour work week. Nine out of 10 of these meetings led to nothing because there wasn’t a fixed agenda, there wasn’t an expectation of deliverables and outcomes.
The first thing we do is look at the entirety of the meeting structure and figure out what is necessary, what’s not. EOS prescribes a rhythm, starting with the Level 10 meetings at the leadership level. That is a fixed agenda. I cannot emphasize to you how much of a blessing it is to know that your agenda is fixed. I lived in worlds where we made up the agenda every single week.
There’s nothing magic to having a fixed agenda, but there is magic to a fixed agenda that works. The Level 10 meeting agenda structure drives at the things that have to get done — the deliverables, the outcomes, the clarification around priorities and problem solving. That structure can be modified. Generally it’s shortened as you go through the organization. Your line staff, maybe they only need a weekly 30-minute Level 10 meeting.
The assumption is that if a team, the leadership team all the way through the organization, is having their weekly Level 10s, that becomes the context for the brain trust. I don’t have to go knocking on my boss’s door, my colleague’s door with every monkey that’s on my back. I put the issue on the list. I get to be the squeaky wheel and say, “I need this issue solved.” We lean into it. We solve it. We move forward.
It also instills a discipline to say we don’t sit around and pontificate. Define the issue, get to the root of the issue, discuss it. Everyone gets a voice, but we’re not repeating. There shouldn’t be any squirreling, and there shouldn’t be any bullying in the meeting. We got to call out the elephants in the room, and we don’t need to beat a dead horse, and there are no sacred cows.
We have hard, meaningful discussion that drives outcomes. There’s got to be a solution, and that solution may be “none of us really have an opinion about this. Sam and Jay have all of the knowledge. We’re going to schedule 30 minutes, solve this, come back to the team, report on our recommendation, and move forward.”
EOS instills a meeting rhythm that gets rid of a lot of meetings. You may have a big event, you need an event meeting once in a while, but it clears the deck of a lot of that wastage of time.
What role should software play for an EOS implementation?
There are tools that just make the process smooth. What I find about Strety is it’s not cumbersome. Somebody can be the scribe. I try not to have the technology be the focal point in a meeting, but be able to utilize the technology to clarify where things are at and to make things evident and apparent.
Part of that happens on the front end, when the technology is clear and accessible and a dominant feature in the tech stack of an organization. I insist on my clients spending 15 to 30 minutes, preferably the day before their Level 10, to go into Strety to look at what the Issues are, to put in their Measurables, to indicate whether their Rocks are on track or off track. Do all the things I’m responsible for. But also prepare myself for the meeting.
I can see, “Samantha put this Issue in. I don’t need to go and ask Samantha about it.” Maybe I want a little bit of clarification, but I know these are the three Issues that I need resolved out of the gate, and I’m going to make it known as part of that prioritization.
Great EOS software helps on the preparation side. It helps in the smooth running of meetings, and I can’t really prescribe how because every team is a little bit different. Some people still want to capture everything on paper, and that’s awesome, and then somebody is the scribe to put it into the system. But now it’s centralized, and people can live from that source of truth and engage with it during the week and be able to honor it as the repository of the important things that move the process forward.
What advice would you have for any nonprofit considering an EOS implementation?
First, a nonprofit really needs to make sure they understand that this is about growing, about being better, about engaging in an open and honest conversation with team members, and that the leader and leadership team is ready to make space for that possibility. Not all leadership teams and organizations are.
I like to frame it as leadership development. These are best practices that most people have not learned, whether in an MBA program or the school of hard knocks. It takes time for people to learn how to work more efficiently and effectively. It’s not like we run on EOS, it’s a light switch, and suddenly there’s a ground epiphany and you’re moving forward differently. It takes time, it takes work, it takes persistence.
The last piece — an implementer. I’m going to plug the value of an EOS implementer. An implementer is that outside voice that brings mastery of the tools to be able to teach, the ability to facilitate, the ability to coach. It accelerates an organization’s use of the tools and enables teams to navigate hard issues in ways that they might not otherwise.
When interviewing EOS implementers, the vast majority of us know the stuff and have the ability. I’m a former CEO in the nonprofit space, so that’s a little unique, but it is about chemistry. Do I want to spend time with this person? Or do I as the implementer want to spend time with these people for the next couple of years? If that chemistry is not there, find somebody else.
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Thanks, Jay! For more of Jay’s wisdom and his great writing, visit his website. To learn more about Jay’s work as an EOS implementer, check out his implementer page on EOS Worldwide.