Author: Vu

Shadows of the unicorn: How good leaders can negatively affect the world

Posted on by Vu

unicorn shadowHi everyone, I came back recharged after spending a week sequestered at the University of Washington for the Nonprofit Executive Leadership Institute (NELI). I learned many things about myself. For example, I tend to cuss way too much when giving toasts (“Hells yeah, this is the best @#$%& leadership program ever; let’s drink to that $#@%, mo-fos!”). This may explain why I don’t get invited to many weddings or kids’ birthday parties.

The five and a half days were intense, 10 to 12 hours each day learning about important concepts like “Are we spending enough time on the balcony, versus the dance floor?” “Are we using both formative as well as summative evaluations?” “Do we have enough jargon in the field, or should we create more?” And “Have we nonprofit leaders let ourselves go in the dress department?” The first three questions depend on your organization, but the answer to the last one is, “No; grey hooded sweaters and jeans are perfectly appropriate attires for nonprofit leaders, provided they have no more than one visible stain each.” I like to think of myself as a less economically comfortable but equally sexy nonprofit version of Mark Zuckerberg.

The week was a wonderful and much-needed time to connect with colleagues, and many of us seriously rethought our basic strategy for solving challenges. My new ED friend, Michelle, for example had the strategy called “Just Punch People in the Throat.”

Before, my default philosophy for handling everything was the “Gotham City Approach,” which was to destroy something so that a better version could form, for example, “What? Our database is down again? We must destroy it so that a new database could rise from the ashes!” or “The marketing committee is not meeting regularly? We must destroy it so that a new marketing team could rise from the ashes!” Or “What, he left his dishes in the sink again?! We must destroy him so that a new staff who could wash the dishes promptly could rise from the ashes!”

Now I’m thinking about Technical versus Adaptive challenges, Moving the Flywheel, the Fox vs. the Hedgehog, the 7-S’s, the 3 C’s, Flipping the Iceberg, Tickling the Badger, and Riding the T-Rex.

OK, I made up the last two.

What I’ve been thinking about most, though, is an essay from Parker Palmer’s book, Let your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. He talks about how most leaders tend to be extroverts, because society thinks those qualities—being able to be sociable, to network, to give speeches—are what make good leaders, and leadership programs orient toward these skills of manipulating the external world. Focusing on shaping the environment around them, leaders rarely spend time looking inward. And why would they? Looking inward is at best not fun, and at worst messy or even painful.

But leaders, by definition, project light and shadows on the world around them, and if they don’t know themselves, they can project way more shadow than they do light. According to Palmer, we tend to project these shadows below. He talks about leaders in the general sense, so I’ll try to relate that to our nonprofit work:

  • Our identity matters more than others’. In our need to be recognized, to be rewarded, to have a sense of self, we often deprive others. Good leaders understand that “Identity doesn’t depend on titles. It doesn’t depend on degrees. It doesn’t depend on functioning.” At annual dinners, for example, “important” people like politicians sit in the front, close to the stage. But why? Maybe we should save those seats for our students, community members, and key volunteers.
  •  The universe is hostile, and everything is a battle. The work is stressful, and we tend to use metaphors like “continue fighting” and “do or die,” “pull out our big guns,” etc. But this sort of attitude of competition and war becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I find that I tend to think that way, especially when there is so much crappiness and unfairness everywhere. But maybe no one is really out to get anyone. Our role as nonprofit professionals is not to fight some vast invisible army bent on evil and injustice, but to restore balance where there is imbalance.
  • Functional Atheism. This is Palmer’s term for our unconscious belief that if anything good will happen, we ourselves have to be agent. Basically, things will continue to suck unless I am personally going to do something about it. This may explain why we nonprofit types burn out so quickly. We each genuinely believe that we and we alone can save the world, and Smokey the Bear does not help at all with his message that “Only YOU can prevent forest fire!” You know what, there are many people in the world, and Palmer says “we do not have to carry the whole load, that we can be empowered by sharing the load with others, and that sometimes we are even free to lay our part of the load down.” Dude. That’s such a relief. If we can all believe that, maybe we won’t all burn out as fast.
  • Fear of chaos. Many of us are chaos-tamers. We like this role, bringing order where there is none. We freak out when systems are not in place or they’re not working perfectly. But all sorts of great stuff comes from chaos. It is necessary for creation.  And when leaders fear it and not treat it as something necessary and natural to the existence of order, others fear it too and then everyone freaks out about everything.
  • Denial of death. We think of death as a bad thing, and we try to hold on to life. This may be why we cling on to programs and projects that should have ended or changed a while ago, or why so many of us have issues with founding board members, who refuse to accept that the death of their involvement and influence may be necessary for new life and ideas to form.

All right, that’s a lot to think about. I haven’t thought this much in a long while since the first episode of Sherlock Holmes (the one with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman). I needed to write these lessons down for my own inner processes. Palmer’s point that we all, especially those of us called “leaders,” can vastly influence the world around us for good or for not-so-good is an important one to mull over. We must take time to know ourselves. We in nonprofit are all unicorns, as I wrote in this post for Valentine’s Day, “Nonprofit Professionals, You are Each a Unicorn.” But even as unicorns, as we do our work, we should take time to think about whether we are casting more shadow than light on the world and people around us.

And if we are, we should destroy ourselves, so that better unicorns could rise from the ashes…

Who moved my unicorn: Adaptive versus Technical challenges in the nonprofit field

Posted on by Vu

vunicorn2Day 3 of the Nonprofit Executive Leadership Institute (NELI). Thank you, Medina Foundation, for this scholarship so I can participate in this program. I am learning all sorts of interesting and useful stuff. For example, don’t eat nine pounds of potatoes before a 3-hour discussion on measurements and evaluations. Kidding, kidding!

A very useful concept that we have learned is the concept of Technical challenges versus Adaptive challenges. Good leaders must understand to differentiate one from the other, and oftentimes we totally suck at doing that. Technical problems are simpler and usually have apparent solutions. Adaptive challenges are so much more complicated and involve human beings and their emotions and crap like that.

“The most common cause of failure in leadership is produced by treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems,” says Ron Heifetz in his book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, and I am beginning to see that as leaders and as a society we all do this all the time. For example, a while ago, a friend gave me a unicorn poster. I put it up on the wall next to my desk, and the unicorn looked down at me and inspired me to do my work. One day I came to the office, and the unicorn poster was gone! I asked a staff about it, and they said there wasn’t enough Velcro tape for it to stick to the brick wall, and that’s why the unicorn fell and had to be moved to the corner. But this was my unicorn, and I didn’t like it being mishandled and moved around because it was a really cool and rare unicorn poster with significant emotional value and I was used to it being where I left it.

All right, fine, shut up. Here’s a better example. Let’s say you have a program that teaches kids confidence and creativity through cooking. The program, however, is not financially solvent and has been causing the organization to lose money as it operates. The technical solution is to shut down this program. Simple, right? Of course not. “We are leading a blood-and-guts organization with real emotions inside it,” said our instructor, Professor Stephen Page. Staff and volunteers and participants of this program have likely put blood, sweat, and tears into their cooking. Which is probably why their dishes always come out so salty, ahahaha.

All kidding aside, think of the people involved with this program that we are cutting. They are invested in it, this is their baby, and this is a huge change. Change always involves loss, and when there is a loss, there are the stages of grieving, including denial and anger and bargaining and sadness and only at the end is there acceptance. “What is technical to us may be adaptive to someone else,” we learned, and a leader who only sees the technical side of a problem may totally screw up.

Leaders must understand the difference between what is technical and what is adaptive.

We see this misdiagnosis-and-thus-mistreatment (MTM) all over the field though, on larger scales. For example, “Huh, we don’t have enough people of color on our board, and 80% of our clients come from communities of color. Let’s ask a couple of POCs to coffee and talk them to joining our board.” That solves the technical problem and totally misses the point, which is that the organization must adapt and figure out why people of color are not on the board in the first place, what the obstacles are, what the privileges and power dynamics are, etc.

God, this happens all the time, I now realize, and it is annoying at best and absolutely horrendous at worst, perpetuating terrible and crappy systems. A while ago I wrote this post on an awful grant that low-income schools are forced to write. The MTM here is “Oh look, these poor schools need resources. Let’s provide them funding. But wait, with so many schools in need, how should we fairly distribute the money? Let’s make them write 30-page narratives each, and the school with the best written applications should get the funding.” So simple. So technical. And totally screwed up (Schools wih the most needs probably don’t have the resources to write competitive 30-page grants. And forcing struggling schools into a Hunger Games-like battle is fundamentally wrong).

If we truly want to help low-income schools succeed, we must think of it as an adaptive challenge. That means we have to reexamine our beliefs and systems and way of doing things. We cannot reduce blood-and-guts kids and families and communities to technical numbers and rating scales.

Technical fixes are so much quicker and easier to explain and implement, which is why our society loves them so much. But they only work for technical problems. If a plant looks droopy, you water it. If the roof is leaking, you slather some tar on it, stick a shingle on, staple it, and cover with duct tape (Or whatever; I don’t know anything about fixing roofs). We in nonprofits face far more complicated problems, and probably 90% of them are adaptive, not technical. Within our own organizations, we could have change in leadership, or staff turnover, or inactive boards, or a multitude of other challenges, and it is critical for leaders to recognize the adaptive elements and take actions accordingly.

But we must also pay attention to the bigger challenges that we are trying to address as a field. Too often our society treats problems (homelessness, hunger, poverty, low-performing schools, gentrification, racism, etc.) as technical challenges and implements technical solutions when they are far more complicated and requires getting people and systems to change and adapt. Sometimes, facing the complexity of adaptive societal challenges, we turn to technical solutions because they are better than the alternative of doing nothing. Let’s make poor schools write 30-page grants! Let’s get a woman to join our board! Let’s get two organizations led by communities of color to apply to join our coalition! Let’s form a collective impact backbone organization! Let’s put all our funds into collective impact even at the cost of vital direct services!

We need to understand these challenges better, because unlike me and my awesome unicorn poster, our kids and families and communities cannot be helped with some additional Velcro tape, no matter how well-meaning.

The 7-S’s of effective organizations, plus cherry blossoms and existential crises

Posted on by Vu

cherry blossomsThe dinner went remarkably well, and for the past three days I’ve been feeling a sense of after-event euphoria. That, combined with the contact high from legalized pot in Seattle, has led to one of the best weekends I’ve had in a while. Now I am at a hotel near the University of Washington, sequestered here this entire week for the Nonprofit Executives Leadership Institute (NELI), a time for us nonprofit leaders to take a break from daily work and reflect on things like adaptive leadership, board engagement, strategic thinking, and how ancient and decrepit we are in comparison to the fresh-faced college students here, who are walking around while texting, oblivious to the world around them.

The course is pretty intense, but I might try to use this blog for some reflections on the key concepts that strike me. Apologies in advance if the posts come too often and clog up your inbox.

Today, among several concepts, we learned of the 7-S Model created by McKinsey consultants ad Harvard Business School and Stanford Business school professors. The S’s are:

Strategy (what actions the organization uses to be more awesome than its competitors),

Structure (who reports to whom, how authority is distributed, is it hierarchical, how departments/divisions interact, etc.),

Systems (processes and procedures like a database, budgeting, planning, monitoring, and rules around washing dishes because it’s disgusting when staff leave them in the sink for days!),

Staffing (recruitment, retention, professional development, do we have the right people, and why is Steve still around when doesn’t do any work and never washes his dishes?),

Skills (the organization’s distinct competencies, developed over years, such as “We are the best in the business at teaching youth to make balloon animals”),

Style (the organizational culture, often led by the people at the top. For instance, does the ED have an open-cubicle policy, or does she prefer to close the door in order to weep quietly by herself?).

Shared Values (written and unwritten values to guide the organization, for instance, “focus on quality” or “customer service above all” or “Let’s just try not to screw up.”)

In successful organizations, these 7 S’s are aligned with one another. When there is a disconnect, it could spell trouble for the agency. For instance, if a Shared Value is Innovation, but the organization fails to take risks and never tries anything new, or if the Value is Quality, but the morons who don’t focus on it keep getting promoted, then it may be a serious problem.

It was good fodder for thought. But the thing that really made me think today was something not in class at all. It was the cherry blossoms. UW has a dozen ancient cherry blossom trees in its Quad. Today, the trees are in full bloom, looking breathtakingly magnificent and smelling like Spring, like happiness, like childhood, like general operating funds. Hundreds of people were in the Quad, including a wedding party that used the snowy backdrops for pictures.

Three other EDs and I walked to the Quad and were amazed by the beauty of the cherry blossoms. “The cherry blossoms are a great symbol of nonprofit funding,” I said. Another ED piped in, “Yeah! We wait for them all year. We cultivate them. Then the arrive and they’re gone in days!” Ahahaheheheh, we all laughed. That’s how we EDs laugh. Then we sighed and scoped around for a bar.

The cherry blossoms, of course, are symbolic of both how beautiful life can be and yet how ephemeral it is. I imagine that many of us choose the stressful nonprofit field because unconsciously we know that life is short, and to get a grip on our impending mortality, we strive to do something meaningful with our time. I don’t think this is a bad thing. There are far worse ways to deal with the existential despair we all feel from time to time.

For instance, grabbing some pimply college kid by their hoodie, slapping them around a bit, and screaming, “Stop texting and look at the cherry blossoms! You don’t know how good you have it! Enjoy your youth, you exquisite fool, for soon it will be gone, and you too shall look like I do. Look at me! THIS IS YOUR FUTURE!”

***

Discussion questions:

Which S does your organization excel at, and which ones does it suck at?

How much do existential factors influence your work?

How much trouble will I get into if I slap some random college student who is walking and texting?

“On the Threshold of Awesome”: An ED’s speech to his staff before the annual event

Posted on by Vu
Source: alanarnette.com

My team, this week will be our organization’s annual fundraising event. These three words have struck fear into the hearts of even the bravest of us since the beginning of time.

The intensity of the past fortnight must be acknowledged. I see it on your weary faces, gaunt from lack of sleep, haunted by endless tasks, by worst-case scenarios, and by the merciless passage of the hours. I see it on your hands, marked by papercuts from sponsorship packets and development committee meeting agendas. I hear it on your voices, made frail by hours of phone calls to vendors, guests, volunteers, and the Liquor License Board.

No one would think less of you for admitting that you feel some trepidation now, at this moment, three days before the culmination of all our hard work for the past seven months. I, too, am nervous, and during my own slumberless nights, I confess that I sometimes envision running off into the wilderness to live as a hermit, surviving with small woodland creatures I’ve befriended who help me gather berries and mushrooms. I would have a pet chipmunk named Mr. Squeaken, and Mr. Squeaken and I would live a simple existence in the forest, away from speeches and auctions and check-out lines.

It is OK and normal for all of us to feel nervousness and even fear at this time. For the things in life that are most worth doing will usually be the hardest. We as human beings all feel fear at various points in our lives. But did fear stop Sir Edmund Hillary? Did fear stop Lewis and Clark? Did fear stop the Wright Brothers? No! They ALL had to plan at least one annual fundraising event, and they did fine. Yes, Sir Edmund Hillary also had challenges with the registration line. And we all know Lewis and Clark’s “Hot Soup Dash” resulted in minor injuries to many guests, and thus everyone now does “Dessert Dash” instead. Despite these challenges, their events were successful.

I know then, from history, that our event will be OK. In fact, it will be awesome. It will be awesome because the work we do to lift up families and communities is important and this event is toward furthering this goal. It will be awesome because our supporters are some of the most generous and understanding and good-looking people ever and they will forgive minor mistakes. It will be awesome because it has been getting more and more awesome every year since we started doing this.

As importantly, it will be awesome because we are us. Look around you. Are these not some of the most brilliant and talented people you have ever worked with? Is this not the most dedicated Development Director and Development Committee and board members ever? Sure, we are slightly disheveled after moving large pieces of decoration and picking up 40 vases and whatnot, and the stubbed toes and carpal tunnel don’t help. And James, you should see a doctor about your twitching eye. But we are a team, an amazing team, and if anyone can pull this off, it will be us.

The next three days will be more intense than ever. Last-minute registrations will come in, and we will be spending hours figuring out which table is placed where. Some people will cancel. Some sponsors won’t be able to fill their seats and we will rush to fill them. Critical volunteers may come down with the stomach virus and not be able to help. There will always be a case of stomach virus at this time. Desperate calls will be made. There may be some crying in the fetal position, but I will try to control myself. The office will be packed with crap. Many of us will stay late preparing logistics while listening to 90’s hip-hop. During these next three days, we must be patient with and supportive of one another, even of those coworkers who keep playing Dave Mathews Band’s “Proudest Monkey” over and over again, arguably one of the dumbest songs ever written, for God’s sake!

But it will all be worth it. Our students and families and community depend on our programs. We will have an incredible event, an event for the history books, an event that we will tell our grandkids about. Long after we are all gone and time has erased our footprints and other traces of our lives, people will still be talking about this day. And they will say, “Those folks at that organization, they did good. I’m glad my grandparents raised their paddle.” Then they will hop on their hover board and fly off to the moon or something.

So have heart. We now stand on the threshold of awesome, and this week we will cross it. We will do so because we are us, and we always get stuff done. You may feel stress and trepidation now, but remember the inspiring words of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He said, “The only thing we have to fear…is probably audiovisual glitches. That $#!% will seriously mess up your event.”

—

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Nonprofits: We must break out of the Scrappiness Cycle

Posted on by Vu

Next week my organization is having its annual dinner, which means that right about now everyone is busy and on edge. Occasionally we share our anxiety-induced nightmares with one another as a form of stress relief:

“There I was, sitting at my table next to the Mayor and Benjamin Franklin. Suddenly James comes on stage, and he was holding a giant raw fish as a prop for one of his jokes. And I thought ‘No! You can’t handle raw fish on stage, since you’ll be shaking hands with everyone! We’ll get blamed for an outbreak of salmonella!’ I tried screaming, but no sound would come out. We were doomed. Doomed…”

The dinner has been consuming all our waking, and apparently non-waking, thoughts. Last month, a donor sent in a gift basket for the staff for the Lunar New Year. It contained high-quality chocolates and cookies and was wrapped up all nicely. We quickly sent a thank-you note. At the next staff meeting I took out the basket and started to open it. A hush fell on the meeting room.

“What are you doing?” someone asked, shocked.

“I’m opening it,” I said, “it’s for us.”

“Wait!” said the group, “it’s too nice! We should use it as a raffle item at the dinner!”

These last few months have made me realize that we nonprofits are constantly in the Scrappiness Cycle. We are always scrimping, trying to find the best deals, trying to get stuff discounted or preferably free. We scour Craigslist looking for usable furniture, and we pounce on businesses that are moving or closing, hoping to score a kick-ass filing cabinet (with a lock!). It has become a mindset that is ingrained in all of us. It is our donors’ money! We must save! We must be responsible!

We totally should. But I think we have gone too far. Scrappiness and frugality are great skills that everyone should have. But like sake bombs, they should be taken in moderation. It would be better for our organizations, our clients, and our own sanity to actually be a little LESS scrappy.

First, there is the time and opportunity Cost: In our quest to save a few bucks, we miss out on more productive opportunities. To save about $2,000 to furnish our previous office with 8 work stations from IKEA, for example, a staff and I rented a Uhaul, drove to a business that was moving, and brought home 8 wooden desks or so. For free! They were heavy and the project took us a whole day to move, several days to assemble, and another day to get rid of the desks once we found something better and equally as scrappy.

This time that we spent moving and assembling furniture could have been spent connecting with donors, writing grants, or otherwise doing something that could have brought our organization money. Worse, while assembling a desk, a piece fell and scraped my shin, leaving a painful bruise that lasted literally months. If I weren’t so nice and hadn’t initiated the project, I could have sued the organization.

Second, scrappiness prevents us from thinking beyond the short-term. When we are scrappy, we tend to skimp on necessary resources like the right people and the right tools, which means we can’t be as effective, which means we have to be even scrappier to survive, perpetuating a vicious cycle that keeps us from moving forward and leads to really crappy office chairs from Craigslist. How many boards are so fixated on how much is spent on office supply or other expenses, instead of focusing on the long-term growth and awesomeness of their organization? I was facilitating a retreat a few weeks ago for the board of another nonprofit. This was clearly a dedicated, passionate working group of people. But they were stuck in the present, and with almost no staff, they were reaching burn-out. Running completely on volunteers is very scrappy, but it is difficult to sustain.

Third, and most importantly, we nonprofits really need to get out of this Martyr Mentality. It seems we nonprofit staff take an unspoken vow of poverty when we enter our profession. It has been beaten into us over hundreds of years, and like smoking or checking emails in bed it is a very difficult habit to break. But we have to. This mentality is ineffective; it drives talented people to burning out and to leaving the field, and it negatively shapes the perceptions of people who are not in the field, preventing good ones from even thinking of entering.

We need to believe that we are not bad people for wanting nice things like a decent work space (See “Nonprofit office space: We deserve better!“). I’m not talking extravagant things; this is not a carte blanche to say that we should skip out on due diligence and go crazy buying caviar and use fancy French terms like “carte blanche.” But buy a metal filing cabinet with locks. Take the team out once a while for lunch. Hire the necessarily staff. On occasion this may seem risky, considering how unstable our funds are and how society expects martyrdom. But society cannot expect us nonprofits to continue to hunker down, be scrappy, avoid risks, and hope to thrive. But it will if we ourselves keep believing and perpetuating this cycle.

The Scrappiness Cycle doesn’t work in the long run. And we and our community deserve better.

So. Back to the gift basket. “Our annual dinner is coming up,” I said, “and this basket would make a nice raffle item, ’tis true…

“But no, it’s for us,” I continued, finding momentum in my speech, “We work hard. We deserve something for ourselves once a while. We’ll find other stuff to raffle off. Plus, it’s not nice to the person who gave this to us if we give it away. We’d be disrespecting their wishes. No, it is our DUTY to eat these treats!”

“Eat these treats! EAT THESE TREATS!” the staff chanted in unison.

All right, they didn’t do that. They still looked at me like I was crazy. But they reluctantly accepted, and I tore open the cellophane…

What the…

Dammit! There was nothing vegan for me!

We wasted a nice pre-wrapped basket for NOTHING!