Reading for Leading Change

We recommend these recent articles as you seek out new inspiration and innovative approaches to nonprofit leadership and social impact.

What have you read lately that helped you lead your organization? We’d love to hear about it.
 

Building Resilient Organizations: Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis

We think this recent article by Maurice Mitchell in Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine is a must-read for making sense of and providing a hopeful path forward for our nonprofit sector and social justice movements. The essay shares what we “must do to shift movements of justice toward a powerful posture of joy and victory” and “describes the problems our movements face, identifies underlying causes, analyzes symptoms of the core problems, and proposes some concrete solutions to reset our course.” Mitchell calls for building resilient organizations that are “structurally sound, ideologically coherent, strategically grounded, and emotionally mature.” Strategic planning plays a key role in this vision of resilience.  

Five Essentials of Workplace Well-Being

We have learned directly from our clients how the pandemic created stress and burnout in the workplace over the past few years, particularly for nonprofit direct service staff. This Five Essentials framework by the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General clearly articulates five key aspects of well-being centered on workers’ voices and equity, promoting and advocating for the well-being of all workers.

Should We Cancel Capacity Building?

We appreciated this article by our colleague Marcus Littles at Frontline Solutions that challenges our field’s use of the term “capacity building” and highlights the need to focus on strengths. He advances four Black equity principles for philanthropy that have emerged out of this work: truth, strategic disruption, strength, and love.

Culture of Belonging Toolkit

We found the Jewish Community Federation’s Culture of Belonging Toolkit so deeply relevant to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and to our strategic planning work with our clients. A culture of belonging strengthens a sense of mattering, meaning, ownership, and shared purpose for all within a group and an organization. When there is belonging, all participants feel like owners and they share responsibility for making a great program. But belonging doesn’t happen by chance. As leaders, we must be intentional and systematic about implementing a culture of belonging.

Keeping Your Core Values at the Center

When facing challenges, articulating our values and holding ourselves accountable to them can provide the guidance we need.

You may have read about how the people of Rotterdam, Netherlands, stood up to Jeff Bezos. He and the maker of his new, three-masted, $500 million schooner wanted to temporarily disassemble a beloved old bridge to move his new ship out to sea at no financial cost to the city. The community was furious and refused. We found this story delightful and inspiring because the community rallied together and stayed true to their values, which is so important for organizations to do.    

But before a nonprofit can stick to its values, you must articulate them. Clarifying values presents a team-building opportunity for staff and board to surface and reflect on your organization’s core values, and also to define how you do your work and implement your strategic plan. 

Values are your organization’s principles and beliefs about what is important and worthwhile, and they guide how an organization executes on its mission. Values must be more than aspirational or desired qualities. They are inherent strengths that are lived and breathed by your organization. 

When identifying your values, you’re articulating the principles and beliefs that are most important to your organization. Louis Raths and John Dewey identified these elements that define a value:  

• Prized and cherished: it must be something you prize and cherish

• Publicly affirmed: you must be willing, when appropriate, to publicly affirm what you value

• Available alternatives: there must be the possibility of alternatives

• Chosen intelligently and freely: it must be chosen freely and after consideration of the consequences

• Action: it involves acting on your belief

• Repeated action: you must be willing to act on it repeatedly and consistently

Having clearly articulated and explicit values motivates teams by providing a uniting, principle-based guide for action and a filter for decisions and behaviors. The more that nonprofits stay centered in their core values when making decisions and leading teams, the more they will strengthen their culture and ability to execute on their missions.

Leading with Hope and Inspiration in Times of Despair

Nonprofit leaders advance their missions in the face of extraordinary and sometimes overwhelming barriers. Many teams are exhausted from the combined personal and professional demands from the pandemic, national policies working against us, and the daily impacts of racism, climate change, lack of gun control, and income inequality. 

How do we keep going when we’re feeling despair? 

Despair is a natural human reaction to the losses and devastations in our local communities and country, and this can be particularly overwhelming for social sector leaders who are dedicating every day of their lives to advancing equity and justice. 

Research compiled by the Greater Good Science Center found that successful resilience includes finding our higher selves in the midst of conflict and negative emotions. Successful approaches include looking to something larger than ourselves such as nature, ideals, and communities; looking inward; and looking to other people for meaning and purpose. 

The Greater Good Science Center’s Dacher Keltner, an expert on awe, identified eight wonders of life that inspire awe: the moral beauty of others, collective effervescence (such as dancing or singing together), nature, music, visual art, spiritual practice, big ideas, and encountering life and death. Awe leads us to feel we have more time in our work and to care more about the purpose of that work than its likelihood of bringing status or material gain. 

Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield recently shared his view that “despair is an insult to the imagination.” He reminds us that genuineness, happiness, and meaning will come through tending to suffering. Each of us can contribute to the sanity of the world by cultivating compassion for ourselves and others and acting for the benefit of others. 

Tips for Designing a Successful Board Retreat

Effective board retreats have clear objectives, well-stated expectations, meeting agreements, an agenda sent to participants in advance, and a comfortable setting. Here are three more tips to ensure your next board retreat will be inspiring, meaningful, and actionable: 

1. Nurture connection: Use your board retreat as an opportunity for your board and staff to talk and get to know each other. Especially after 2+ years of a pandemic, we’ve all had less time together. Create as many opportunities as possible to break into pairs or small groups, design interactive exercises, and incorporate some social time. If the meeting is in-person, host a meal to share together. 

2. Engage in strategy: Retreats allow for longer discussions than typical board meetings, so take advantage of that and dig into a substantial strategic issue, opportunity, or challenge. Educate yourselves about the landscape, trends, and opportunities facing the organization. Invite outside experts or direct service staff to make a presentation, or get an in-depth update from your CEO. Use the time to explore how you are advancing equity and living your values. 

3. Make a commitment: The impact of your retreat can last long after it’s over. Determine what commitments the board is going to make collectively and as individuals, and capture a list of actions for follow up. This can be a detailed annual board goals worksheet that each board member fills out, or as simple as taking the time to identify one thing each board member commits to doing in the year ahead to support the organization in relation to the retreat’s discussions and the organization’s needs. Pair up board members as accountability partners or establish another system for accountability, and check back later in the year during board meetings about the commitments made. 

Keeping Your Strategic Plan Adaptable in an Uncertain World

A strategic plan is not a document we just establish and execute. Rather, a strategic plan is the launch of an ongoing responsive process that continually evolves. A strategic plan helps an organization prepare for the future in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (also known as “VUCA”) world, and provides a way to navigate changing circumstances. 

Our VUCA world creates many leadership challenges including lack of clarity and focus, overload of priorities, difficulty building relationships, short-term thinking, and burnout. 

We ensure our strategic planning processes are adaptable and stay relevant by:

• Facilitating an inclusive process throughout. We wrote earlier this spring about how to form an inclusive strategic planning committee. This inclusive committee and early planning process ensures that critical constituents, both internal and external, participate in building the plan. Not only does this help get good content and insights into the plan, it also ensures the plan is successfully implemented because the participants are already engaged and owning it. Furthermore, the process of planning strengthens the team and builds their collective muscle for navigating, predicting, and preparing for changes. 

• Proactively identifying and planning for obstacles and opportunities. One way to do this is via scenario planning. Obstacles can include external uncertainties in the environment, or internal capacity challenges that the organization will need to bolster. Building contingency plans or a Plan B may be useful in certain cases as well. 

• Building in a rhythm for monitoring and evaluating the plan once it is adopted. Department and employee annual goals should track to the strategic plan. We recommend quarterly strategic reviews to report progress toward the strategic plan and provide an opportunity to discuss and assess what has changed and if there are any initiatives that you should start, grow, adapt, or stop in light of changes.