Making a Personal Plan: UPDATE

MY LAST POST DESCRIBED HOW I WAS PREPARING FOR A GET-TOGETHER WITH CONSULTING COLLEAGUES to examine the next steps of our careers. If you visit Linda Norris' blog, The Uncataloged Museum, you'll read a really good recap of how five of us came together last week to work through a discussion that none of us had had in quite this way with others before. Linda describes the flow of our activities and some key ideas and elements that made our time together not only worthwhile, but truly energizing.

What we did is not a new concept -- people get together all the time to share information, network, and help sort out career questions. Our families and friends often are our sounding boards, mostly because they're convenient, they care about us and are, therefore, likely (or required) to listen. But they may not be as helpful as colleagues or mentors who bring the world view of our respective professions, as well as some critical distance, to our seeking.

Do opportunities like this seem to happen more in the for-profit world, where resources are presumably more abundant for professional development? Given the responses to Linda's and my posts and tweets, I think it might not happen as frequently in the nonprofit sector -- at least, the cultural part of the sector where I spend most of my time. But given the fact that most of us are facing economic constraints of one sort or another, stagnate or declining employment, arts/cultural organization mergers or dissolutions, or the squeeze of elder care, child care or both, it makes obvious sense for nonprofits to focus more attention than normal on structured professional growth. You might check out Michele Martin's Bamboo Project blog for a great post on positive professional development.

What I learned last week is what many of you may already know or have experienced: it's really helpful when you can receive insights from some respected colleagues about your skills and attributes, your strengths and weaknesses, and which ones can carry you forward to something you hadn't thought of (or dared to think of) before. When we decided to spend the morning performing a SWOT (strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats) analysis on each other, we uncovered a wealth of information that crystallized into a number of fairly specific potential opportunities. It set the stage for a day's worth of creative problem-solving that only a group of engaged people could do.

Where we take our individual plans is now up to each one of us. But we'll have the group to return to for advice and ideas. We've made a commitment to stick together to help each other as well as ourselves.

Image: Idea from faithseekings

Back in the Saddle

MY LAST POST WAS NOVEMBER 2012, A LIGHT YEAR AWAY it seems, that marked the beginning of a long push toward completing a manuscript on history museum leadership with my co-author, Joan Baldwin. We finally submitted 350+ pages to our editor at Rowman & Littlefield this week. If all goes well, we expect the book to be available in early 2014. It's taken us two years to get to this point, so six more months or so of revision and production don't seem too long to wait until we can hold the final product in our hands (and you can, too!). The project put a lot of things on hold, including this blog. I'm glad to be back writing about intentional leadership -- leading by design -- for nonprofit boards and staffs. Certainly, my thoughts are now informed by the forthcoming book, in which Joan and I posit that nonprofits need to focus resources on leadership, not just management. Most cultural nonprofits are at a crossroad, as is the sector in general, where nothing is qu

Change for Your Board in 2010: A Polling Update

WE'RE A DAY INTO MY LAST POLL (SEE RIGHT) AND the responses are clustering in two areas: 1) removing dead wood from the board and 2) using better/different tools to make decisions/evaluate performance. There are still six days left for your colleagues to cast their vote! In the meantime, those of you who are in need of tools for decision-making might want to check my posts on taking stock here , here and here .

Three Most Important Nonprofit Executive Director Soft Skills

If you were asked to narrow down the list of executive director qualifications to the three most important, which ones would you identify? Would the list consist of soft skills, hard skills, or some combination? Would your list be based on the great ED you are or one you've worked for, or would it be your wish list for the ED you haven't been fortunate yet to work for? This was an assignment in my recent online class in leadership and administration for the American Association for State and Local History . I asked the class to review three-five advertisements for museum directors and analyze what these listings intimated about the organization’s past experience, current focus and goals, and future aspirations. Then, I asked the class to identify what they consider to be the three most important qualifications they would look for in a director. (Okay, so there's more than three if you dissect my three big groups.) Soft skills outnumbered hard skills, although

Leading by Design

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