Time to Go
Executive directors routinely ask me how to know when it is time to leave. I wish board members asked me that same question: how do they know when it is time for the executive director to leave?
It isn’t that I don’t think the first question is an important one for every executive director to ask him/herself regularly. Though the essence of my answer has not changed over time, the order in which I deliver my responses has.
The first part is this: it is time to Read more
Letting Employees Soar
One of the hallmarks of a profession is that it has its own unique body of knowledge. Sometimes the unique body of knowledge of one profession butts up against the unique body of knowledge of another, and then what do you do?
For example, the unique body of legal knowledge tells board members one thing about doing work with a board member’s company (that is: so long as the board member disclosed the conflict of interest and her/his fellow board members knew of the disclosure, her/his Read more
Degrading Core Values
Three disparate things happened to me within the course of one workday that all sing a similar and very important message.
First, was the interview I heard with James Comey on NPR’s Morning Edition. One of the many compelling comments he made came back to resonate at the end of the day, connecting with two other seemingly disparate events. Regardless of the impetus for Comey’s comment, his message is one we should all heed.
“We fight like crazy in this country about guns and about Read more
Good Enough. Is it Really?”
Growing up a cultural Jew, I inherently knew, early on, the importance of “culture.” Reading Oscar Lewis’s La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty in my freshman year in college gave me the academic affirmation of the extreme importance of culture. Now reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy affirms for me, yet again, that we ignore culture at our own peril.
Given that I am not a therapist and this isn’t therapeutic blog, I’m actually not talking about the culture of family and Read more
What’s Trending in the Nonprofit World?
I am always hesitant to talk about what’s happening on the corporate side of the aisle for fear that people will assume incorrectly that I’m holding it up as the model of all that is good and right. But, I do believe that there is value in looking at what is trending in the for-profit sector to find lessons we should learn. (I also believe that the for-profit sector should equally be looking at us to see it can learn from nonprofits). After all, as Read more
Beauty in Shared Leadership
At the start of a recent board training, I was asked the following question: “An executive director once told me that a good board meeting was when he could write the minutes of the meeting before the meeting even started. Do you agree with that?”
I admit to being a bit taken aback by this question. It isn’t that I haven’t worked with a fair number of controlling executive directors who would embrace the sentiment, and some who would take it even a step further and Read more
Sustainable vs Viable Nonprofits
There is little doubt in my mind that the greatest challenge facing every nonprofit is not whether it is sustainable, but if it is viable. Many nonprofits that aren’t viable have proven their ability to be sustainable—defined as the ability to be maintained at a certain level.
Sustainability makes no judgment as to the quality of the level at which the organization is maintained, simply that the level is maintained, month after month, year after year. Thus, we can easily describe an organization that regularly operates Read more
Ripped from the Headlines
What can we learn from some cautionary tales from recent news stories about nonprofits?
Headline 1: “Donors Demand Return of Historic $100 Million University Donation.” (Fortunately, for the university’s sake, “only” $22.9 million has actually been received.) But before you start chuckling about how you are unlikely to ever be so lucky as to receive a $23 million gift, let alone a $100 million gift, stop. The lesson of this headline isn’t in the amount that the donors want back but in the university’s (perceived) failure Read more
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
After leading recent board training, a board member apologized for what she considered to be the rude, disrepectful behavior of some of her colleagues and staff, who had held sidebar conversations throughout the training. Sadly, I had to tell her, I was quite used to it, as it happens far more often than not, along with those constantly checking their phones. She went on to talk about the loss of manners in our society.
And while our society has lost its appreciation for manners, I believe Read more
