Nonprofit Leadership, Innovation, and Change

Leadership Compounds

Leadership compounds.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and decade after decade.

Why does it compound? For the simple reason that when you focus your effort in one area day after day for a long time, you’re going to get better. You’re going to improve, you’re going to make change, and that change will naturally lead to more change.

Like most things, leadership only compounds if you’re focused on growth. Focused on growth means you attend conferences, read good books, and take time to think and reflect. If you’re not consciously focusing on growth, what you’re doing is not going to compound over time. It will be like the Pastor who said he had been in the ministry for 20 years, but only had one year of experience because he had experienced the first year twenty times.

To keep your leadership compounding through growth you must be:

• Doing
• Learning
• Growing
• Implementing

Then the process starts all over again with you building on what you’ve already done and learned from.

Leadership compounds.

Why should I have different people in the room?

This is a vital question, one that I will pose to you.

Who is in the room when you are casting vision, making decisions, or planning for change?

The people you have in the room when these topics come out is going to define your organization’s ability make a difference. When you have people in the room, they need to be different.

You need to have different people in the room for three reasons:

• Different thinking
• Different skill sets
• Different experiences

I once read about a story of Henry Ford who was in a meeting with his board when he said, “Ok guys, so I guess we are all in agreement on this?” as they all stated, “Yes, we are.” Mr. Ford proceeded to say, “Ok, then I’m going home, you guys stay here and until we have some disagreement on this, we’re not going to make a decision.”

Let me explain more for these three areas:

Different Thinking – I love good thinkers. They aren’t always the best implementers, but I can always find someone to implement someone else’s ideas. I also love to get good thinkers to disagree and engage in conversation with other good thinkers. You need to keep them thinking in the areas of their strength. Some people are good thinkers in the area of fundraising, planning, administration,  or accounting practices.

Different Skill Sets – These are the people who help the good thinkers discover if their ideas are able to actually be implemented. Good thinkers are often just that, good thinkers. They don’t always have the best grasp of reality. So it takes a person with good skill sets to help determine which idea can be implemented, and out of the ideas that can be implemented to decide which idea is the best one to implement. People with different skill sets are the delegates. They are the ones who actually make it happen. They often  come alongside the thinkers and make their ideas and vision become a reality. People with different skill sets are usually like the craftsman and mechanics. They are great at looking at something, using their hands and parts to build it and make it work.

Different Experiences – These are the people who can draw on past experiences, successes, and failures to help things move forward. These experiences provide insight and resources for everyone to draw on. Here’s the thing you have to watch out for with experiences, their past experience can greatly hinder your organization’s success. Just because they have failed or seen someone else fail in a certain area, might cause them to think everyone else will fail in that area.

However,

When you get different people in the room, you're going to have disagreements. One of the great qualities of leaders who can run effective meetings is being able to successfully and smoothly facilitate disagreements between members of their staff and team.

This has been a huge element of my role with A Day of Hope. We often sit in meetings for our leadership team and fundraising team with so many ideas going around it’s crazy. Most of the volunteers are young energetic people such as myself, so they are always bouncing ideas around and asking great questions.

I hope you now see why you should have different people in the room.

How does leadership make a difference?

One of my commitments as a member of the A Day of Hope Internet Fundraising Team entails my requirement to make a new Squidoo Lens every month ("lens" is a fancy word for web page). Usually this means I think and create some written content that is posted on the lens.

Here's one of my recent lenses that talks about Ways Leadership Makes a Difference. It outlines 17 ways that I believe leadership makes a difference.

1. Great Leadership Makes a Difference
2. Great Leadership Makes People Better at What They Do
3. Great Leadership Enhances & Keeps People's Confidence
4. Great Leadership Makes Better Kids
5. Great Leadership Makes Better Families
6. Great Leadership Helps People to Find Their Passions & Strengths
7. Great Leadership Makes the Economy Stronger
8. Great Leadership Makes the Economy Stronger
9. Great Leadership Guides Us Through Crisis
10. Great Leadership is What Catalyzes Change
11. Great Leadership Motivates Other People to do Their Best
12. Great Leadership is What Makes Change Stick
13. Great Leadership Keeps People Going During Tough Times
14. Great Leadership Attracts Better People to the Organization
15. Great Leadership Inspires People to Do Their Best
16. Great Leadership Gives People the Discipline to do the Right Things
17. Great Leadership Allows Room for People to Grow & Develop

For more details on the 17 ways, you can check out the official lens. If you purchase a book on the lens the proceeds earned from that book are donated to A Day of Hope. So feel free to be generous. :-)

Jobs for Change

With the recent changes in our economy and world, it seems that people aren't just looking for work, but they're looking to transition careers. They're looking to change into something new, fresh and that has more meaning to them. Something where they're able to use their skills and gifts in a greater capacity.

Currently I'm working on a print interview with Rick Smith, author of the soon to be released book, The Leap which talks at length about career changes people make.

With this change in careers some people are looking to possibly begin working in the nonprofit sector.

A reader recently sent me a link to a new website launched for the special purpose of helping people who are looking for jobs in the nonprofit sector.

Whether you're a nonprofit veteran looking for a new position, or if you've worked in the corporate arena for years and now you want to test the waters of nonprofits, Jobs for Change can give you a head start in looking for jobs in the nonprofit area.

People Serve Two Things

People serve two things: they serve the cause of your organization and they serve you.

People will work for the cause temporarily, even if they don’t like or respect the leader.

However, if someone works for the cause and for the organization, they are going to work a lot harder and create much better quality of work.

Leadership has been defined as winning people to your cause, and I think leadership is also winning people to you.

When they follow you based on who you are and what you stand for, combined with the cause of an organization that they believe in, it creates a powerful combination that cannot be matched.