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Best Friends Animal Society

Executive Team Workshop for a National Animal Welfare Organization

CauseMic held discovery sessions with 21 Best Friends executives to build a streamlined decision-making framework.

The Challenge

Utah-based Best Friends operates the nation’s largest sanctuary for homeless animals along with providing adoption, spay/neuter services, and educational programs. Their goal? To make every shelter and every community no-kill.

Over the last 10 years, Best Friends impressively scaled from $30M to $120M in annual revenue, amply powering their mission.

While they enjoyed significant growth in size and complexity, they also faced a few new challenges, primarily around decision making and alignment across the organization. As with many organizations, Best Friends’ chief officers and departments operated in silos instead of working collaboratively, which made it difficult to get everyone on the same page and tackle their biggest challenges.

woman with a cute rescue dog in a harness

CauseMic was brought in to help Best Friends address one primary question:

  • How might we improve and clarify our decision-making process in pursuit of our mission?

Our Solutions

Our CauseMic-led workshop helped Best Friends get leadership connecting across silos using structured conversations about how decisions are made.

"How Might We" Workshop

  • We engaged 21 chief officers and senior directors to gather feedback on current processes, align priorities, and understand existing barriers to decision making.
  • During a half-day leadership workshop, we identified key challenges to an effective decision-making process.
  • We defined what successful problem-solving looks like and how to determine the decision maker and who’s accountable.
  • The workshop also surfaced several underlying issues that did not come out in discovery, each of which could be addressed collaboratively following the CauseMic-led session. These included:
    • Lack of leadership alignment on priorities and resources
    • Inconsistent communication among leadership
    • No formal process for making and communicating important decisions

The Results

To address both the original challenges and those subsequently unearthed during discovery and facilitation:

We partnered with key Best Friends leadership to design and launch a pilot decision-making framework, tailored to their unique organizational structure to promote clear and organized decision making.

We really appreciated how CauseMic took the time to truly understand our team and what we were trying to accomplish.

After just a short time working with us, they had an impressively precise understanding of our work and the specific challenges and opportunities we were trying to tackle.

This allowed us to hit the ground running and not have to do a lot of legwork to bring them up to speed. I found them to be incredibly thoughtful and responsive partners in this work.