After decades of serving, supporting and staffing non-profit boards, I remain stumped about how to make them work well over time. To grossly summarize –most Executive Directors think boards are a bother, most board members don’t feel valued and most meetings are either boring or painfully stressful. Most boards do a lousy job supervising their […]
Transformation? What? Now?
I’ve spent the last few weeks focused on ‘transformation’: sitting in on a national workshop called Advanced Leadership for Organizational Transformation and joining an international live webinar training for Mindfulness at Work: Transforming Stress into Well Being. The first was useful; the second was amazing. But the big question for me throughout was – what’s […]
Hunker down or charge into battle?
I had a call today with a colleague in Washington, DC whose organization does both inside-the-beltline high impact defense and state/local slow-change work. From my distance, it’s easy to say that both efforts are critical in these frightening, uncertain times. From her vantage point, however, the two lines of work don’t sit so comfortably together. […]
Moving Forward: Lessons from Kung Fu
Maybe we’ve moved beyond the first step of the grieving process and we’re looking for a few anchors to steady our organizations and ourselves as we confront this post-election ‘reality’. I stumbled on this 2012 article about the relevance of the teachings of Chinese martial arts — and these 4 concepts: Assume a posture of […]
Here’s how I’m surviving the days after the election
I have a habit, sometimes obnoxious, of always looking for the bright side. Today, a few days after the election that will create President Trump, I’ve been talking with colleagues about any opportunities this tsunami presents for non profit organizations, particularly those in the economic and social justice arena, and their supporters. Here’s what I’m […]