Melissa Russell on Scaling Innovation, Culture, & Team Alignment (charity: water)
“When you make the transition from operator to leader, you have to be intentional about how you’re defining success.”—Melissa Russell
What does it actually take to scale a nonprofit without losing culture or clarity along the way?
There’s no one better to show us the way than Melissa Russell.
Melissa carries a wealth of nonprofit leadership experience as the current President of charity: water and former President of International Justice Mission (IJM), where she’s strengthened clarity and culture through seasons of growth and created environments where both results and people matter.
Charity: water is an incredible organization. Not only have they funded over 186,000 water projects in 29 countries, but their innovation to engage donors in seeing exactly where their donation goes is second to none.
In this conversation, you’ll hear how Melissa found her way into nonprofit leadership (or rather, how it found her), along with what she’s learned in such high-level roles about leadership, vision-casting, culture, and innovation.
Listen in!
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Key Takeaways
Reevaluate your definition of success as you shift roles throughout your career. Any time your role changes, your definition of success typically should as well. Once Melissa moved into leadership, her definition of success shifted to support, empowerment, and team-wide outcomes. It wasn’t about whether or not she could personally be the one to raise $10M anymore, for example. That wasn’t actually her job. But she now had to be capable of leading the people whose job it was. She had to pull the best ideas and performance out of her highly-capable team.
Don’t undervalue the power of your 2030 vision. Yes, most nonprofits have set a vision for the next 5 years. Yes, there’s value for how you’re engaging donors with that vision. But this also has immense value for your internal team’s alignment, so they have the clarity of where you all are headed together.
Nurture innovation with margin and empowerment. Innovation requires margin from a time perspective and a financial perspective. But it also requires permission from leadership, both spoken and felt. While we can protect our organization from over-spending on new ideas by monitoring performance closely, we can’t ask our team to be innovative if we’re not giving them the actual space and permission to be.
Meet the Guest
Melissa Russell has over 20 years of experience leading and scaling mission-driven organizations. Before joining charity:water, Melissa spent over 16 years at International Justice Mission (IJM), where she served as President of North America, Chief Advancement Officer, and Chair of Global Revenue. Across her career, she has helped drive more than $1.5 billion in philanthropic revenue, while uniting global teams around a common purpose. Melissa earned both her BS in Journalism and MA in Advertising from The University of Texas at Austin.
