New to Leadership? Build Your Filter Before You Build a Plan
Starting a new role as an Executive Director or Marketing Lead is a strange kind of full. Your inbox is full. Your calendar is full. Your head is full of everyone's version of "how things have always worked here." And somewhere in that fullness, you're expected to have opinions about what should change and what shouldn't.
That's operational overwhelm with a side of walking on a tightrope. We hear this from new leaders at faith-based and purpose-driven organizations all the time. The job isn't just doing the work. It's figuring out which work matters, without alienating the people who built what came before you.
At Graf-Martin, in our role as Fractional Marketing Support, we spend a lot of time helping leaders manage this moment. Here's what we've noticed: the leaders who move through it well are the ones who build a filter early. A communications strategy that tells them what to say yes to, what to say no to, and why.
Here's how to think about your filter, and how to build one without treading on too many toes.
The Three Things Working Against You
Vague overwhelm is hard to solve. Specific overwhelm isn't. Here are the three things most likely to slow a new leader down:
Operational overwhelm. New leaders inherit systems (most of the time you are not working from a blank slate). Small nonprofit teams wear every hat. You, or your one comms person, are the writer, the designer, the strategist, the social media manager, and the person who answers the phone when the ED is out. Communications and fundraising aren't the same skill. They call on different muscles. Most people in this role are expected to do both, fully, with limited time. Then add leadership-driven pivots. A board passes a motion. A major donor calls with an idea. Suddenly, your calendar stops feeling like a plan and starts feeling like a series of ambushes.
Fear of cultural friction. This one is quieter, but it's often the bigger barrier. Within your organization, there are relationships and trust, built over years by people who are part of your new team. A new leader who charges in with a redesign plan in week two risks looking dismissive of everything that came before, even when that's not the intent. There's a related fear specific to mission-driven spaces: the worry that being strategic about communications means becoming more corporate than mission-minded. That having a plan compromises authenticity. A plan doesn't make an organization not as genuine. It means the team has thought carefully about how to tell the story of the work, and committed to telling it well.
Wasted efficiency. This happens when the first two problems go unaddressed for too long. Teams keep producing content and running programs at full speed, but without a shared filter for why. Everyone stays busy. Little of it compounds. It's motion without direction, and it's tiring in a way that's hard to name, because on paper, everyone's working hard.
Sound familiar? You're not behind. This is the job. And it's a hard job to do well without the right tool.
Say Yes, Say No, And Know Why
A communications strategy is a filter you run new ideas and old ones through.
When a team feels stuck, it's rarely because they lack ideas. It's because they lack an objective way to evaluate their own ideas. Should we keep the quarterly print newsletter? Should we try short-form video? Should we sunset the annual event that takes twelve weeks to plan and isn’t reaching many people? Without a strategy, the assumptions we carry can answer those questions, or whoever is loudest in the meeting. With a strategy, one question answers these questions: does this serve our audience and our objective?
That shifts our state-of-mind from reactive to intentional. We have seen it become the single most useful thing a new leader can build in their first few months. It gives everyone, including you, permission to make decisions without doubting every one of them.
We covered this at length in a recent workshop at the Faith, Fundraising, and Communications Symposium on Building A Living Communications Plan When Everything Is Changing. Plans don't fall apart because people are careless. They fall apart because they were built to be followed exactly, in a context that never holds still. A living strategy, built as a filter and not a fixed roadmap, stands when your environment is constantly shifting.
Here's what that looks like in practice. Below are three scenarios you may personally recognize:
A leadership ask. A board member or ED walks in with an exciting idea and wants a full campaign built around it by Friday. Without a strategy, you scramble, drop your priorities, and lose progress on what you already started. With a strategy, you say: "I love that. Here's where it could fit in our current plan, and here's what we'd need to move to make room for it. May we talk trade-offs?"
A coworker’s request. A colleague asks you to promote their initiative in the middle of your busiest campaign window. Without a strategy, you either say yes and dilute your message, or say no and look unsupportive. With one, you say: "Our focus right now maps to this specific goal. Let's feature your initiative properly, in the window where we have the bandwidth to do it well." That’s a yes with a timeline, not a no.
A team question. Someone asks, "Should we be on this new social media platform?" Without a strategy, the answer is a guess. With one, you ask: does our audience live there? Does it serve our objective? Does it fit our actual capacity? The strategy answers the question before anyone has to debate it in the moment.
In each case, the strategy doesn't slow anything down. It does the deciding for you, in advance. That's exactly what makes it useful when you're new, still building trust, and don't yet have the standing, or the bandwidth, to make every call from instinct alone.
Honouring What Came Before You Is A Good Posture To Have
You don't need to dismantle what came before you to build something better. The leaders who earn the most trust in their first year usually start by understanding why the current system exists, not just what it looks like. That newsletter that goes out every month whether or not there's news? It might be leftover legacy work. It might also be the one touchpoint a founding donor looks forward to. You won't know until you ask, and listen.
A few principles worth holding onto:
Understand before you evaluate. Before deciding whether a program or channel works, learn who built it and why. Gathering the context makes your recommendations land as informed, not dismissive.
Involve the people who'll feel the change. Strategy built in isolation and then handed down invites resistance. Strategy built with input from the team, even informally, meets far less friction at implementation.
Separate "different" from "wrong." Not everything that predates you needs fixing. Some of it needs updating. Some of it just needs a clearer “why” attached to it. Your filter should help you tell the difference.
Let’s talk about good posture (which this shrimp does not have)
Be curious before critical, informed before decisive. It costs a little speed early on. It saves months of repairing trust later.
What This Looks Like in Your First Few Months
If you're staring down a long list of channels, programs, and inherited habits, here's a simple sequence:
Map what exists. Every channel, every recurring communication, every program, without evaluation yet. You can't build a filter for a system you haven't fully seen.
Name your actual objective. Not "better communications," but the real organizational goal underneath it, aka SMART goals. Donor retention? Awareness in a new region? Volunteer recruitment? Your strategy should specifically serve that.
Build the filter. Write a short, plain-language statement of who you're talking to, what you want them to feel or do, and how you'll know it's working. This is your strategy. Keep it short enough to use in a meeting, not just file away and forget about it.
Print it and stick it. No like actually print off your strategy statement and display it where you can see it; on your laptop, in your office, on a whiteboard.
Run everything through it. Keep what passes. Sunset or rework what doesn't. Do this openly, with reasoning attached, so the “why” travels with the decision.
Revisit on a cadence, not a whim. Strategy isn't set-and-forget, but it's also not something to second-guess weekly. Build in a regular check-in. Quarterly works well for most organizations. Let your communications plan flex there, on purpose.
None of this requires overhauling your organization in month one. But it does requires asking questions, listening, and building a filter that makes every future decision faster, clearer, and easier to defend, to your board, your team, and also to yourself.
The Leaders Who Get This Right
We've worked alongside next-generation leaders overseeing this exact transition. Entering roles built by people who came before them, carrying real respect for that legacy, while still needing room to lead through their own judgment. The pattern shows up again and again: the leaders who move fastest, long-term, are the ones who slow down just enough at the start to build a real filter, rather than reacting their way through the first year.
Our founder, Ellen Graf-Martin, spoke to this on a recent episode of the Cause Leadership Podcast, in a conversation about leadership transitions in the charitable sector. Her advice for new leaders comes down to a filter of its own: "Engage the right community, not just donors." A communications strategy isn't only about audience segmentation and messaging. It's about knowing who genuinely needs to be part of the conversation as you find your footing, and who doesn't need to weigh in on every decision. The right community can carry some of that early-days overwhelm with you. It just has to be built on purpose.
Operational overwhelm eases when you stop holding every decision in your head and start running things through a shared standard. Cultural friction softens when your changes come with a clear, honest why attached. Wasted efficiency disappears when your team has a shared answer to the question that's been quietly draining them: are we doing this because it matters, or because we've always done it?
You don't need every answer in your first ninety days. You need a good filter to start finding them.
