Blog
Perspectives, tools, and practical guidance for leaders navigating growth, complexity, and organizational change.
Before You Hire the Leader, Design the Role
Too often, organizations recruit leaders to solve problems without first examining the structures, systems, authority, information, and processes within which those leaders will be expected to operate.
They hire a person to fix what may be an architectural problem.
But there’s an important distinction between designing an executive role and making the executive’s decisions in…
Keep reading
Why Scaling Before You’re Ready Is a Longer Road to the Same Breaking Point
Most founders experience the same inflection point. The business is working. Clients are happy. Revenue is growing. And then somewhere around ten to fifteen employees, or the nonprofit equivalent, something shifts. Things that used to be easy get complicated. Communication breaks down. Delivery gets inconsistent. Good people start making avoidable mistakes. You hire to fix…
Keep reading
What is an Operations Audit and Why Your Organization Probably Needs One Before Your Next Hire
The most common thing I hear when I suggest an Operations Audit is some version of: “We already know what’s broken.” Maybe. But in fifteen years of doing this work, I’ve never completed an audit that didn’t surface at least one significant issue the leadership team hadn’t identified — and usually several. That’s not a…
Keep reading
Why Good Organizations Get Small Gifts When They Deserve Large Ones
There’s a moment I watched happen over and over during my years working on the grantmaking side of philanthropy. A nonprofit leader would sit across the table, passionate and articulate about the work their organization was doing. The programs were real. The impact was genuine. The donor was moved. And then the conversation would turn…
Keep reading
Why We Named a Consulting Firm After a Baseball Statistic
People ask me about the name. RBI stands for Resilient Business Infrastructure, which tells you what we do. But RBI is also a baseball statistic. A Run Batted In. And that’s not an accident. Baseball is, at its heart, a game of strategy and execution. The manager’s job is to develop the plan, build the…
Keep reading
Why Busy Organizations Stand Still — and the Four Stages That Fix It
Here’s a pattern I’ve watched for twenty-five years inside and alongside growing organizations — nonprofits, small businesses, municipal governments. Everyone is working. New initiatives launch every quarter. Somebody’s improving the onboarding process while somebody else overhauls the filing system and a committee redesigns the newsletter. There is energy everywhere. And the organization isn’t moving. I…
Keep reading
A New Name. A Clearer Definition of the Work.
Five years ago, I started Lisle Consulting Group with a fairly simple premise: growing organizations often need experienced operational leadership before they are ready to hire it full time. The work was good. The premise was right. But over those five years, something became increasingly clear. The problems our clients were bringing us were rarely…
Keep reading
When ‘We’re a Family’ Is an Operations Problem
I want to be careful here, because what I’m about to say is often misread. So let me be direct about what I’m not saying: culture matters enormously. Relational trust is one of the most powerful assets any small organization can have. The sense of shared purpose and genuine care for each other that characterizes…
Keep reading
You Can’t Hold People Accountable for a System You Never Built
There’s a conversation that happens in almost every organization I work with, in one form or another. A leader is frustrated because their team keeps dropping the ball on something. The balls are different every time: a deliverable that keeps slipping, a process that nobody follows consistently, a decision that should have been made weeks…
Keep reading
Tribal Knowledge Is Not a Competitive Advantage
In the early days, the fact that everything lives in someone’s head feels like an asset. Your team is fast, flexible, intimate. You don’t need documentation because you have people who just know. And there’s something genuinely good about that — the relational density of a small team, the shorthand, the trust. Then someone leaves.…
Keep reading
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.