Leading by Design

Even though 2020 will technically be in our rear view mirror soon, its ramifications will be with us for years to come. Make no mistake, there's a lot of work to do. So, here are my four really tough, but really important, resolutions designed to lay some solid groundwork for doing your best work in 2021. Aren't you glad there are only four? If you're interested in my resolutions from previous years, take a look here  and here .

Times of extraordinary change and disruptions demand flexibility, humility, perseverance, self-reflection and a responsiveness to a complex confluence of realities by museum leaders. Agile leadership requires mapping out a meaningful, relevant, and financially viable path forward to achieve greater public impact, inclusion, and value through resilience practices. Resilience strategies require rethinking long-held approaches and tackling embedded exclusionary, colonial, and outmoded ideologies and practices to establish more flexible, inclusive, and responsive frameworks that better align with external realities. With your purchase of THE RESILIENCE PLAYBOOK and time with the Resilience Team, your organization can reimagine a future that is relevant and responsive to the changing world around us. Specifically, THE RESILIENCE PLAYBOOK encompasses 5 Resilience Goals and 20 Plays that offer practical and empowering approaches to help your organization realign around equity and inclusion, c...

I've been following some of the running commentary in a couple of Facebook groups that cater to nonprofit leaders, both veteran and emerging. I'm glad to know there are active and supportive fora where folks can vent their frustrations and celebrate their accomplishments. We all need a safe space in which to do just that. The venting focuses almost exclusively on workplace issues -- you can probably guess them -- lousy pay, crushing hours, troubles with subordinates, trouble with board members, ethical dilemmas, general frustration with the pervasive notion of scarcity to which many nonprofits cling. While the members of the Facebook groups represent a teeny fraction of the actual nonprofit workforce, I believe their challenges are widespread and probably growing as the number of nonprofits continues to expand. These challenges aren't new, although increased external scrutiny and competition have made them more pressing, more in-your-face, and no longer avoidable.  T...

It's hard for me to believe I've let my blog writing lapse for so long and to my many readers I apologize for that. It's not that I haven't been writing, because I have, just in other fora. The last year-and-a-half was taken up with co-authoring a new book, Women and the Museum: Lessons from the Workplace , which will be published next spring by Routledge. Gender equity for all women is on my mind. Hardly a day goes by without seeing or hearing a story on this topic, but there seems to be little movement toward positive change despite the attention it's getting. Lest you think gender equity is a symptom unique to under-resourced nonprofits and old-school for-profits, I'm here to tell you that it plagues every sector from Silicon Valley to higher ed to Hollywood and, oh, yes, it's alive and well at your friendly neighborhood cultural and social welfare organization. A group of colleagues and I recently published A Call for Gender Equity in the Museum W...

RECEIVING A SUM OF MONEY UNEXPECTEDLY (or half-expectedly) isn't as unusual as it may seem in the nonprofit world. It often comes in the form of a bequest, but it might just as often come as a year-end gift from a loyal member.  Sometimes, it's a grant few thought the organization would ever be competitive enough to get.  Or a local corporation or government acknowledges the efforts of a nonprofit that is making the community a better place. The question that gets some organizations tied up in knots is how to make the best and most efficient use of these funds.  We all dream about how we'd put a few thousand bucks to use if it were to arrive on our doorsteps, but when actually faced with a check in one's hands, the dreams may be...well... too dreamy.  Where should it go, if the donor hasn't stipulated a place for it to land? The director of a small cultural nonprofit asked me this question.  After several years of increased attendance and program income,...

IN MY LAST POST, I WROTE THAT CHANGING CAREERS or career focus is a powerful catalyst for shaking up sedentary thinking. It can reveal new professional perspectives and approaches to problem-solving. It can lead to new skills, networks, and best practices.  (It can also lead to sleepless nights, that slow-rising fear you overlooked something critically important that will come back to haunt you, and the trepidation of mastering a new technology. But that's another story for another time.) For me right now, it's about revealing the many forms and pathways that organizational leadership can take.  I've been a staff leader my entire working career. During that time I've learned a lot of leadership lessons, but I've also developed some predictable assumptions about what leaders do and personal expectations about what I, as an organizational leader, do.  Since shaking myself up eight months ago, my leadership assumptions have been tested in ways that often jump out f...

IN PREPARATION FOR A NEW BOOK on history museum leadership that I am co-writing with my colleague Joan Baldwin, we are knee-deep in interviewing leaders across the country.  Our leaders not only head organizations, some of them lead departments (or are departments of one) and others are exerting leadership in other capacities at their museums.  Their ages range from the mid-twenties to the mid-sixties -- newly minted to veteran  museum professionals.   Joan's discovered in some of her interviews that a key element of leadership is courage.  I was fascinated because it hadn't bubbled up in my interviews, at least not in so many words.   So, I decided to ask about it in my next interview. My interviewee agreed.  It first takes courage to decide to be the leader of an institution; to trust in one's abilities to lead others; to articulate a vision even when it might be tough to imagine a future.  It also takes courage to make decisions that ha...

The Great Recession is dragging into year four and there's no question it has left most nonprofits staggering as they try to find some equilibrium under the weight of constricted philanthropy, slashed government funding, and the high stakes competition of foundation and corporate support.  Some institutions are finding gold in big name programs or capital projects, while many struggle to manage the spiraling costs of their "if we build it, they will come" aftermaths. Event attendance remains predictably unpredictable.   Yet, core audiences in need of programs and services grow.  While the flurry of staff restructuring (read layoffs and furloughs) may now be subsiding, the reality for many (most) nonprofits is that who ever is left is trying to do a lot more with a whole lot less. So that brings me to the point of today's post:  as the staff or board leader of your nonprofit, how has your credibility held up in the eyes of your staff, volunteers and stakeho...

THERE'S NO DOUBT ABOUT IT:  WORKING IN THE NONPROFIT SECTOR is an act of commitment -- often an act of faith -- and always an act of service.  Doesn't matter if you're the head of a major performing arts center or a volunteer manning the reception desk, most of us are drawn to the sector because its meaning is bigger than us. I became more conscious of this reality this summer as I listened to the staff leaders of a nonprofit repeatedly introduce themselves by using the words "I serve".  I wrote about that experience here and since then I've had a lively exchange with one of my former clients about this wonderful notion of nonprofit service and the importance of the words we choose to describe our relationships to the organizations we care about. Imagine my delight when I discovered Ken Blanchard's post , Keep Focused on Your 'Servant Heart' : Try to keep focused on leading with a servant’s heart .  It can be part of your daily habits, such as ...

THESE TWO WORDS GAINED EXPANDED meaning for me this summer.  While spending a week at Chautauqua Institution , my vacation companion and I attended a dizzying array of performances, lectures and conversations with authors and staff.  Each was introduced by the Institution's president or senior staffer, who began by introducing themselves to the audience.  In every case -- and I mean every case -- the staff welcomed the audience, said their names and added their titles by saying "I serve Chautauqua Institution as [insert job title here]."  It was my companion who pointed this turn of phrase out to me.  "Do you hear how they're introducing themselves?" she asked.  She'd picked up on right away.  The more I heard it, the more I was amazed by it -- not just the uniformity in which it was delivered, but by the powerful servant-driven idea behind it.  Obviously, the Institution's leadership made a conscious decision about emphasizing the service aspec...

THIS POST IS FOR ALL THOSE ORGANIZATIONS out there who rely to any extent on membership dollars to fund their work.  This maybe even applies to organizations who don't have memberships, but rely on ticket subscribers, major donors and underwriters.  The question that's on my mind has to do with how much information we give (or withhold) from folks who support us.  How much of the organizational curtain do we pull back for these faithful and generous souls?  After all, it can get pretty messy behind the curtain. I guess it depends a lot on how you/your organization view members.  We expect, perhaps without much thought, that members will automatically renew their support year after year.  We throw some benefits their way, give them a wine and cheese reception every once in a while, and cash their checks.  Are they just dollar signs for the balance sheet, hungry mouths to constantly feed with programming, precious commodities or fickle friends?  Al...

THE ARTICLE I JUST READ ABOUT THE COLUMBUS SYMPHONY ending its season just a hair's breath in the black is cause for celebration in many ways.  As symphonies across the country struggle, merge or outright die, the Columbus Symphony turnaround is worth taking a look at.  What was the secret from going from a projected deficit of more than $1 million to a surplus of $200,000?  Were there lessons for the rest of us embedded in the experience? In a nutshell, here's what symphony leadership did: secured major corporate/foundation support, admittedly much of that was already in the pipeline, but the lesson here is that you don't give up on fundraising in a tough economy, you work the hell out of it secured municipal support -- a tough sell right now, but one likely built on strong economic arguments.  Do you know how much your cultural organization contributes to your local economy? If not, you're overdue in pulling that information together. musicians are now in their...