I wanted to share with the readers of my blog that I have launched a podcast and the first two episodes have been released.
Each episode of the “Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind” podcast will be around 10 minutes long. Here is a link to the inaugural episode, andd here is one to the second.
Give it a listen and a good rating, if you feel it deserves one. And never hesitate to contact me if you have feedback, ideas, or a way you think I can help you in your mission-driven work.
Please consider checking out the two latest posts to my Medium site: “Seven Common Mistakes When Learning a New Language” and “Small Loans, Big Dreams: A RESULTS Volunteer’s 35 Year Journey.”
I will not be sending out too many more notices like this in the future, so please take a look at becoming a follower of my Medium site.
I welcome advice about topics to cover on this new site and also suggestions about possible guest bloggers.
I am experimenting with shifting my blog to Medium.com, and I hope you will follow me on that platform. Check out my first original post on my Medium site, which you can find here.
Firing employees is one of the most difficult things a mission-driven leader has to do. Yet it is important that it be done in a timely and humane manner. Unfortunately, most leaders struggle with this, and their organizations and missions suffer as a result.
I found a recent guest opinion article in the New York Times titled “Layoffs by Email Are Cruel and Unnecessary” to be a good guide about some things to avoid, and why. It was oriented towards large, commercial organizations (mainly big tech companies), but many of the recommendations are universal.
I thought two of the most important suggestions were to not be too worried about employee sabotage—by, for example, cutting off the dismissed colleague’s email access minutes before they are notified—and to conduct the process as you would want it done if the roles were reversed.
The article contains three succinct tips that are consistent with the “role reversal” thought exercise, which the author also describes as respecting the dignity of the person being fired. They are: “Look people in the eye. Answer questions. If someone is upset, show some sympathy.” This is not rocket science, but you’d be amazed how many supervisors don’t practice these commonsense guidelines.
Here are two more tips from me: Don’t use this as an opportunity to tell a story about when you were fired or suffered a career setback (unless the person clearly asks for that). Secondly, in a mission-driven organization, it may be wise to acknowledge that the person you are letting go may have made a sacrifice in terms of salary and benefits to come to work for your organization, which could make the loss of their job even more painful for them.
In my recent books Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind (especially on pages 150-152, where I tell the story of one of the first times I fired someone and how it worked out much better than I expected) and in When in Doubt, Ask for More (on page 173), I addressed the issues of whether, when, and how to fire a nonprofit employee. Let me conclude this post by summarizing the key take-aways that draw from these sections of my books:
1. Get it over with! If you are even thinking of firing someone, it is probably long past time to do so. If your legal and human resources teams tell you to slow down, take their advice on board but don’t be a slave to it. There is some wisdom in their likely desire for due process and reducing legal liability, but there are limits to its usefulness as well. Don’t let them drag out the process too much! Also, think twice before you include a third party, such as a human resources professional, in the meeting with you. You gain a “witness,” but you will probably lose some of the intimacy and humanity in the encounter.
2. Avoid the trap of blaming yourself for an employee’s struggles. In reality, your role is probably marginal. Having a strong “responsibility gene” is a plus in general, but in this case, it is probably misplaced. Your employee is the one who is mainly responsible if they are failing to deliver. (Of course, if there are systemic issues that have put the struggling employee in a no-win situation, then those should be addressed, and it may justify giving them another chance to prove themselves.)
3. Resist the temptation to move a well-liked under-performer from one job to the next as an alternative to letting them go, unless you have strong evidence that they will do better in the new role. (Trust me on this: Most likely, they won’t.) Especially in nonprofits where humanistic values are held in high regard, the stories of struggling employees being moved to up to five positions (and failing to succeed in any of them) are too numerous to even begin to count!
4. Don’t cut the fired employee off immediately unless you have to based either on company policy or on the unique aspects (and risks) of a particular case. Don’t be cutthroat and assume the person will sabotage your organization if you don’t immediately restrict access to their email and files, and to your facility. Let them go in a dignified way, and most likely they will reciprocate in how they treat you and your organization. As I noted in Changing the World, I once had an employee who I had fired a week or two earlier participate in a staff retreat on their last day, and he contributed in positive ways to the session (and years later helped us secure a large grant).
5. If a person wants or has to emote when they get the news of their being fired, just let them do so. In fact, welcome it. Don’t try to fix it and if they apologize, tell them there is no need to do so. Crying in the workplace is not unprofessional; it is human. Have a box of tissues handy.
6. Give as much severance as possible, especially if the employee did not have any ethical lapses. Don’t worry about the precedent you are setting. In fact, if you are reasonably generous and word gets out, people will most likely feel reassured that you take care of people even when you are forcing them to exit—which suggests you will do so at other times as well. And it helps ensure that the departing employee speaks well of you and your organization, or at least doesn’t badmouth you (which they otherwise will do, regardless of what they may have committed to in writing—trust me on this as well).
7. If your organization suffers a financial setback, it may provide you with an opportunity to part ways with underperforming employees in a way that maintains their dignity while at the same time helps you cut costs and improve overall efficiency.
8. While some employees may question your decision to fire someone, especially if they are well-liked, many more will admire your decisiveness, since colleagues have probably been having to cover for the underperforming employee and resent having had to do so.
I have heard many supervisors and leaders say they have lost sleep for days if not weeks as they approached a meeting where they needed to fire someone. It is not a pleasant task. But it is an important one that can and should be done as professionally and humanely as possible. As a leader, it is your responsibility to do make this one of your strengths over time.
I have practiced what I preached above for many years, even though some of it goes against the conventional wisdom and the advice of many lawyers and human resources professionals. I have no regrets and I have never had these approaches backfire on me.
For nonprofit leaders and virtually everyone else, building up confidence in some area normally takes time, while losing it—at least temporarily—can happen rapidly. Confidence in a new skill can also oscillate wildly, as I experienced this past week in Honduras with my intermediate Spanish.
As those who have followed my writings know, I advocate that everyone, and especially mission-driven leaders, be, at all times, engaged in learning at least one new skill—often a hobby—at which they are currently a novice. I have found that this practice helps keep me more humble, curious, and playful, and less self-important, in all areas of my work and life. For the time being, that new skill is mastering spoken Spanish.
At times during the past week, I felt a sense of resignation about my ability to conduct even simple business in Spanish. What resulted was the kind of negative self-talk that we all fall prey to at times. “You started too late! You can’t learn a new language in middle age! You aren’t good at languages!”
Fortunately, I was able to power through those discouraging moments (which were early in the week and occurred mostly late in the day), and go on to have some exhilarating moments of success and stretching myself later in the week.
Lately, I have also been contemplating those times in life when you are in a position to perform in an area you consider a strength, and things go poorly despite the stakes being significant. For example, I was recruited onto a board of directors because the organization recognized my competence in nonprofit governance. And what happened next? They proceeded to force me to resign from the board because they thought I was a detracting from the desired culture (or something like that—they never actually told me why I needed to go). I wrote about that experience at some length here, as part of my journey to process this painful episode, which involved having people I trusted betray me.
My Stanford Social Innovation Review article on nonprofit governance, which was also partly inspired by this conflict, is my most-read of all time and often leads to me being approached by people going through their own nonprofit board nightmares, including a new one this morning. (Advising people on their situations has been one of the things that helped me get my confidence back.)
Let me give three examples involving other people I know and admire where an area of strength seemed to evaporate at a critical moment, then what I think the key lesson is here.
A musician friend who is a great Southern storyteller with a terrific sense of humor once showed up to a gig and the manager said they normally had a comedian warm up the crowd before the band played, but the comedian had cancelled. My friend volunteered to stand in and deliver a routine. He bombed. It turns out that telling funny stories to a group of 5-10 friends is one skill, and entertaining hundreds of strangers is quite another. (An amateur comedian who is a friend of mine once told me that professional comedians today are expected to make the audience laugh every ten seconds or so—something I have confirmed watching live comedy and TV specials.)
My friend’s talent didn’t translate well to new context. He shrugged it off and went on to play bass and sing well with the band later that same day. He has also continued entertaining small groups with hilarious stories.
In another case, someone close to me took a job with an organization she thought she knew well. She was recruited for her technical expertise and for her reputation, but she had been known as a great mentor to young professionals since she had hit her mid-30s. In this new role, after falling out of favor with key leaders and confronting a certain degree of organizational dysfunction, she was told that she was not a good mentor to young staff. Momentarily, it devastated her. She wondered whether she had been kidding herself all along, thinking she was a good guide to the next generation when perhaps she was not. Later, she left that organization and resumed being an effective mentor. Gradually, she built her confidence back up in this area.
Finally, Mannan Talukdar, my research assistant for the book Small Loans, Big Dreams, had previously been one of the most effective Grameen Bank managers of all time. He was also one of the first to ascend to a manager position without a university degree, instead being promoted after serving as a bank worker (later called a center manager). Like my musician friend, he was a great storyteller. (He was also a decent magician.)
I spent many months at a branch that he had founded in the mid 1980s, and he was revered there. I also visited the third and final branch he managed, where he was also very well-regarded. One day, he took me aside and said that at the second branch managed, his approach didn’t really work. He shared this in a matter-of-fact way, as if to say, “I am a great manager, and my record at these other two branches speaks for itself. But for some reason I still don’t really understand, at one other location my skills didn’t translate and I didn’t succeed in the same way.”
I admired much about Mannan, who sadly died in his mid-60s a few years back. But his attitude regarding his failure to thrive in one context was one of the things he taught me that really stuck. Perhaps at the time he was struggling at the second branch, he briefly questioned his competence (though I somehow doubt it). But once had processed the experience, he simply came to the conclusion that his strong skills at managing a Grameen Bank branch often translated into particular contexts, but not always. Those exceptions didn’t nullify his skill. Rather, they revealed that those skills were somewhat context specific and didn’t always ensure success.
Ever since, I have been less prone to questioning my skills based on the fact that they didn’t translate into a particular context or environment (even if that failure to translate was embarrassing or had other negative consequences). That inability to translate might allow me to teach myself something or further enhance my skills, but it didn’t mean that I had been kidding myself about those capabilities all along.
Try to avoid negative self-talk when you see one of the things you do well fall flat here or there. It happens. Learn from it if you can, but don’t get discouraged. You are still good at that thing. Focus on getting better, not on being deflated. You’ll be both happier and more effective.
Sometimes the work of social change calls not for working harder or being more confrontational, but rather for “changing the conversation.” If your argument for altering society’s approach to an issue is a losing one, making it more strenuously won’t help, and it might hurt.
This morning I read an example of this in the New York Times. In a guest opinion piece, an academic from Yale University addressed the issue of rising crime by saying that we need to change the conversation around crime from “tough candidates punishing bad people” to “strong communities keeping everyone safe.” His argument is consistent with what I have been learning about the criminal legal system from some of the grantees of Focus for Health, a foundation I do consulting for, such as Chainless Change and Equal Justice Under Law.
This reminded me of two articles that I have assigned to the students in the nonprofit leadership and social entrepreneurship courses I have taught. One of them, titled “When Good is Not Good Enough,” is mainly about the transformations that the organizations led by two of the authors underwent to achieve greater impact. But along the way they mention how a program to reduce teen smoking in Florida changed their approach from lecturing teens about the evils of smoking to calling for them to use their smarts and skepticism to “investigate” the practices of tobacco companies and come to their own conclusions about what they were up to. As a result, smoking among middle-schoolers fell 19.8% in a single year !
In another classic article in the Atlantic, the author analyzed how gay marriage went from being seen as an unrealistic goal—even to most gay rights organizations—and being rejected by voters in liberal states like California to being a constitutional right in 2015. (Today it is supported by more than 70% of the country and a new federal law.) One of the key parts of going from a series of losses to a long string of victories was having the leading organizations in the LGBT community change their argument from trying to change marriage to trying to join it.
In many cases, creating positive social change requires more effort, more money, more people, and more confrontation with vested interests and other opponents. At other times, however, it may simply require framing the issue, and possible solutions to it, in new, more appealing ways.
What current issues do you think could benefit from being reframed, and how?
As 2022 incredibly draws to a close—wasn’t it just February?—I am taking some time to reflect on my writing and literary work. (My consulting practice is too busy to allow for much time to think about it!)
One aspect of this pertains to my 3 books, including one—Small Loans, Big Dreams (2022 edition)—that came out in September. (Updating it took much more time than I imagined it would, but it was worth it.) Another relates to my articles published by others, such as this one. A final part of the equation is my blog.
I monitor the traffic to my blog on a regular basis (perhaps too often!). The top three posts (by far) for the year to date are:
1. Demystifying the Need for Nonprofits to Register in all 50 States in Order to Fundraise Nationally (with Gabrielle Trippe): 1908 pageviews. This post which was published in 2021 clearly filled a void in the online literature.
2. How to Pass a Resolution at a Nonprofit Board Meeting: 1,124 pageviews. I was surprised that such a basic, nuts and bolts how-to guide became so popular. I wrote this when I heard a nonprofit board chair struggle with this in a meeting.
3. A Case Study in Nonprofit Board Dysfunction: 1,024 pageviews. This was published in 2020 and seems to get a lot of traffic from a link to it in the most widely read article I have ever written: Spotting and Fixing Nonprofit Board Dysfunction in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The latter article has racked up more than 600 pageviews in just the last 30 days alone (and has been being viewed at that rate for several years).
After these 3, there is a big drop-off.
1. How to Prepare for a Meeting with a Major Donor (or Potential Major Donor): 385 pageviews. I often discuss this topic with my consulting clients, and finally got around to putting my best thinking down in writing and putting it in the public domain.
2. The Ethics of Paying Fundraisers on Commission: 336 pageviews. This issue often comes up with my clients whose work focuses on India, since paying people on commission is more common there than it is in the United States.
3. The Case Against Bonuses in Nonprofit and Mission-Driven Organizations: 289 pageviews. This also came as the result of many clients asking me for my views on this aspect of nonprofit compensation. In this post, I shared the views of influential organizations who serve as standard setters more than my own opinion, though I am in fact skeptical of the practice.
In terms of my YouTube channel, the short instructional video that towers over all the rest is one that addresses how to conduct a first meeting with a potential major donor. It has been viewed 1,399 times, including 64 in the last 28 days. (For comparison, the next most watched video over the same period, about the topic of major donor cultivation, has been viewed just 6 times.)
I am wondering what these responses should tell me about the directions I should take the blog in 2023. On the one hand, I want to write about things that interest me. On the other, I also want to cover topics of interest to nonprofit and mission-driven professionals and active volunteers.
I’d welcome comments and suggestions from readers as I plan for the future. Send me your thoughts about what topics I should cover, and how I could promote the blog more effectively. Please know that any time I get a message about one of my blog posts from a reader, it thrills me.
On Thanksgiving, a relative said something along these lines to me, “It’s remarkable that my teenage son has unlimited knowledge and is correct about, well, everything.” His son is indeed very bright, but his tongue-in-cheek point was that his son’s overconfidence and self-righteousness was a bit of an issue at the moment.
I thought about saying that I had suffered from the same delusions at that age, but in fact it wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I thought I have figured everything out—and on top of that was insufferably overeager to share my certainty on matters big and small with anyone who would listen.
As people whom I have taught in college courses or been my mentees will tell you, over time my certainty about so many things has eroded even as my knowledge, experience and—I hope—wisdom have grown.
If you asked me in my 20s about a whether one school of thought or one value judgement about an important topic was right or wrong, I would most likely have responded “yes” or “no.” Today, when faced with the same question, I am much more likely to say, “it depends” or “I don’t know.” Over time, shades of gray, nuance and intellectual humility have become bigger parts of my worldview.
This was on my mind when I read this New York Times article about Elon Musk’s demand that workers at Twitter commit to “extremely hard core” effort and hours. The author largely rejected the kind of culture that Musk wants to create as antiquated, counter-productive, and harmful.
There was a time in my life as a changemaker and as a nonprofit leader when expecting if not demanding “hardcore” effort would have seemed natural to me. I believed that important causes required sacrifice and extreme effort. At other times in my career, I would have flatly rejected the kind of culture that Musk is apparently trying to create as inhumane and unproductive, especially in the context of a mission-driven organization.
Today, at age 55, I see this issue, and so many others, as more complex. On the one hand, insisting on extreme effort from all of one’s employees all year round is a recipe for an unhealthy culture—regardless of how important the cause is. But I do believe there is a place for allowing and even expecting that kind of work ethic for relatively short bursts of time—when circumstances demand it or when an individual employee’s priorities and passions align with it.
To take one common scenario people often talk about in terms of workplace culture, I don’t believe that one should expect an employee to respond to their boss’s midnight email, but I do think it is OK for the boss to send one at that hour if that is when he or she chooses to, and also that it is OK if an employee responds right away if they decide that they want to do so.
At Grameen Foundation, I think we struck the right balance on culture most of the time (which I explore at length in my midlife memoir and in another book which is essentially an annotated checklist of leadership tips and mindsets). For example, we allowed people to work a normal 35-45 hour workweek when that made sense to them, and a 60-70+ hour workweek at other times—without passing judgement on either operating mode (as long as they got their most important work done and didn’t alienate their colleagues or other important stakeholders in the process).
We realized, for example, that people raising school-aged children had different schedules and limitations than those who were not. When an employee needed a leave of absence, wanted to take advantage of a professional development opportunity, or asked to relocate to another state or country for a few months, we let them do it—figuring that this would deepen their commitment to the organization, which it usually did. (And no, they rarely “took advantage” of us by slacking off or looking for another job, though that did occasionally happen.)
Organizations that expect extreme or muted/constrained efforts from all of its employees at all times are unlikely to get the best results or keep the best people. Rather, those that are flexible, humane, demanding, purposeful, and playful generally work the best. Balancing these values, which sometimes compete with one another, is not easy.
Alas, truth is rarely black or white—despite what some 15 and 25 year-olds, and more than a few billionaires, might tell you.
The issue of burnout in nonprofit organizations (and in other demanding professions) has been talked about for years. The umbrella term “self-care” emerged fairly recently (as far as I can tell) to capture ways to prevent and address burnout. Too often, descriptions of self-care boil down to recommendations to take time off, work less hard, and partake in indulgences, such as going to a spa. As useful as these ideas can be, they seem inadequate to me on their own. Taken alone, they address symptoms of burnout more the causes; they represent band-aids more than sustainable solutions or cures.
I described some of my top self-care strategies in the last third of my book Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind, and disclosed how my career almost went down in flames in my early 30s for lack of thoughtfully prioritizing my own well-being. (My book When in Doubt, Ask for More has dozens of bite-sized self-care techniques among the 214 success strategies I briefly describe.)
I have come to think of effective self-care as comprising three elements: life structure, habits, and moment-to-moment decisions. I was moved to write this blog post because of a recent example of the third approach and how it got me thinking more about the entire subject. Let me briefly describe each approach and how they complement each other.
Structuring your life to ensure self-care can take many forms, and is a very personal process. What works for someone might not make sense for another; in addition, what serves someone in one phase of their life might not in another. Common structural approaches include not taking work calls after a certain time of the day, doing certain types of work only or primarily in the morning, limiting work travel to a certain number of days per month, taking direct flights wherever possible (even if they cost more), or ensuring (as much as possible) that one’s primary workspace is bright, comfortable, and promotes wellness. It may be worth it to periodically evaluate the structure of your days, weeks, months, years (i.e., how you spend your time) and your environments (i.e., where you spend your time) from a self-care perspective, and to then take action where important changes are warranted.
Habits, on the other hand, are things that one repeatedly does that are consistent with well-being. For me, always being engaged in a hobby that I am a relative novice in is one such habit. Another may be taking a brisk walk every afternoon, or writing down 10 things you are grateful for every morning before starting work. Obviously, some habits become so ingrained that they become a part of the structure of your life, so there is often some overlap between these first two elements of self-care. Many habits take a month or two to become ingrained, so while the impact may not be immediate, they can take root fairly quickly.
The final aspect of self-care is moment-to-moment choices. These are decisions that one is confronted with, often unexpectedly, that have implications for self-care, wellness, and happiness. Let me give one recent personal example—in fact, the one that planted the seed for this blog post. The other night I was watching my favorite football team on television. They only play on national TV a few times each year. After the third quarter got started, I turned off the TV and went to bed. I did this because I have gotten into the habit of going to bed fairly early so I can wake up at 5am and get a jump on my work while still enjoying 7-8 hours of sleep. While this structural element of my life was arranged to promote self-care, sometimes it works against that priority, and I end up denying myself things I want to do in the evening.
So rather than go to sleep feeling that I was denying myself something I wanted, I changed course and decided to watch the entire game. This lasted for about an hour more; I took out 30 minutes from my sleep and 30 minutes from my workday. It felt like a meaningful mini-indulgence to me at the time. (And, happily, my team ended up winning a close game!)
Each day, we are all faced with many moment-to-moment decisions that represent conflicts between various priorities in our lives: serving and being with family, earning money, doing meaningful work, engaging in our faith traditions or with hobbies, and promoting self-care. When decisions involve a trade-off between self-care and some other priority, simply increasing the number that are resolved in favor of self-care from, say, 40% to 60% of the time can make a noticeable difference in ones well-being—and in a way that complements both one’s life structure and the habits that promote self-care.
By the way, taking the time to write this blog post on an already busy day represented a moment-to-moment decision supportive of my own self-care, which was in some degree of conflict with my desire to get some work completed earlier and to keep some white space (i.e., unscheduled time) in a rather full day.
As a mission-driven leader, emerging leader, or engaged volunteer, what new structural elements can you bring to your life that support self-care? What new habits will you try to create? And what moment-to-moment decisions will you make today and tomorrow that will nourish you and help ensure wellness?
I am returning today from a month in Antigua, Guatemala, where I was studying Spanish for around 6 hours per day, 5 days a week. I have written elsewhere, including in my recent books, about the importance of learning languages and—perhaps even more vital—ensuring that throughout your adult life that you are always engaging at least semi-seriously in something that you are a novice at but want to become skillful at.
In short, I believe that the experience of going through the difficult and at times painful process of developing a new talent helps bring curiosity, humility, creativity, and a learning orientation to all areas of your life. It can be a powerful antidote to creeping self-importance, intellectual laziness, and being a know-it-all.
I am pleased to report that my Spanish language skills jumped from what I would call high beginner to high intermediate over the course of the last 4 weeks. (In the process, I got back to roughly where I was in 2004.) What I did not expect to learn from my instructor were some important and even profound lessons about effective teaching.
I had the good fortune to get individualized instruction from one of the best teachers at one of the best language schools in Antigua. Her name is Lourdes. While I have been, at times, an effective teacher, mentor, and guide in other contexts, she still taught me a great deal about what it takes to facilitate someone else’s learning.
Before I turn to what I learned from her about teaching, let me flag one insight and a related pitfall. We all have the potential to be teachers, even if we have not formally been put in that role. As parents, elder siblings, supervisors, colleagues, mentees, and friends, we can help facilitate other people’s learning and, more broadly, their evolution into their best selves. But, when you play this role without the formal designation of being someone’s teacher, you need to be careful about assuming that they want to be taught by you, or even by anyone.
I have seen some effective teachers and trainers sabotage a potential opportunity for effective instruction by jumping into that mode when their potential learning partner wasn’t ready. (I have made that mistake myself on occasion.) It’s always safest to ask someone whether they are open to be taught by you at a particular moment on a particular topic. Sometimes that isn’t necessary, as a person’s openness to being taught by you is obvious and assumed. If you enjoy teaching, that’s great—but don’t let your enthusiasm blind you to the need to get your ”students” on board with you being in that role for them.
Now, let me share what I learned from Lourdes about teaching. I have tried to generalize her effective practices so that they can be applied in any teaching or training context:
1. Vary methods. Lourdes would tend to spend about 20 minutes on a topic and usually use 2 methods to deliver it: for example, instruction at the white board and/or using a textbook, and then practice (usually structured conversations or drills). Sometimes, if the content was presented earlier, she would go right to practice (perhaps after a brief review of the material). After 20 minutes was over, we would pivot to another topic using another learning technique. (She would occasionally note that we would return to a topic we had just been working on later in the day, especially if I was clearly still struggling with some element of it.) As a learner, the shifting of topics and teaching methods 2-3 times per hour helped keep me engaged.
2. Alternate between levels of difficulty. In addition to varying methods and topics, she also seemed to alternate between highly challenging content and intensive/draining exercises and things that were considerably easier. The less demanding segments let me rebuild my confidence and recover my energy. She would tend to emphasize easier topics and methods as the day wore on, but in any one hour block there would be some more and some less challenging segments.
3. Read the learner’s mood and adjust. If Lourdes saw I was getting discouraged, she would be extra affirming or shift into something that could build my confidence. If she saw I was distracted, she would ask me if I needed an extra break. If I was doing great, she would push me a bit harder. If she sensed I wanted to engage in conversation, she would delay a grammar lesson. If I seemed to want to receive information and not have to engage in conversation or drills, she would focus on that for a time.
4. Take obvious joy in the learner’s progress. When I had small breakthroughs in my gradual mastery of Spanish, as I did throughout my 4 weeks of classes, she would celebrate them in ways that I found touching and motivating. She was clearly on my side rather than simply punching the clock or even worse, sitting in judgement of my wobbly intermediate skills and my “not quite what it once was “ middle-aged grey matter. It’s always nice to make people you admire and like happy; one way I could do that this month was to concentrate and to progress in my learning.
5. Don’t gloss over a learner’s errors or backsliding or their off days, but maintain a positive and supportive posture regardless. When I made errors, Lourdes would almost always gently correct me. She certainly noticed if I was regressing or struggling at any given moment. But she seemed to use those times to be extra affirming of what I was still doing right, and she avoided spending too much time on topics I was struggling with until I had rebuilt my confidence.
6. Try to make learning fun and build in laughter. We laughed a lot, mostly during our structured or unstructured conversations which are a natural element of learning a language. But even when we were doing grammar drills, we tried to find things to amuse us. Laughter tends to relax people, which is one reason why so many people make a joke at the beginning of a speech as a way of building rapport with their audience.
7. Be flexible in your approach. Sometimes I could see Lourdes shifting gears from her original plan for the day. (Another good practice of hers was to preview major exercises a few hours in advance so that I could mentally prepare for them if I wanted to.) Like all good teachers, she has a lot of things in her toolkit. If one wasn’t working on a particular day, she would take out another, rather than stick with something that was making me feel unsuccessful. To take one example, I think she sensed early in our month together that I did not have much bandwidth for homework given the other things I was juggling. So she never asked me to do anything between classes. I’ll bet that if I had asked for or seemed open to assignments between classes, she could have gladly given them to me.
8. Show interest in your student as a human being, and tailor the learning process accordingly. As the month wore on, Lourdes learned more and more about my likes, dislikes, relationships, hobbies, and life journey. Without being creepy about it, she would reference her growing familiarity with me as a way of showing how closely she was paying attention to me as a student and as a human being. That deepened my commitment to learning. She also used those insights to tailor her teaching so that I could learn things that I would want to and need to apply in my work and in my life. Showing real interest in me as her student also helped dial back whatever negativity I might be feeling at any given moment about what might seem at times like frustratingly slow progress.
If you want to learn Spanish, I highly recommend the San Jose del Viejo Spanish School and Lourdes as a teacher—though please don’t request her next August as I hope to monopolize her again! But more broadly, when you are in a relationship that has some element of teaching another person, see if you can channel some of your inner Lourdes and be more effective at facilitating someone else’s learning and growth. I am certainly going to try that myself.
Have you ever had the opportunity for a “do over” when an important project, relationship, meeting, speech, or some other endeavor unfolded reasonably well but didn’t go great? Perhaps a teacher let you re-take a test to demonstrate that you had improved your understanding, or your nonprofit board or donor allowed you to resubmit a report after getting some valuable feedback, or a let was called during a tennis point when you were on the ropes. It can be a powerful and even life-changing experience.
I suppose the idea of a “do over” is a special case of the phenomenon of getting second chances, something I have learned a lot about as it relates to the criminal justice system through my client Marq Mitchell, the founder and leader of the terrific nonprofit Chainless Change. (He avoids the term “criminal justice” and instead uses “criminal legal” system to make it clear that he does not see a lot of justice in how it operates.)
His main point is that when people make mistakes in life (or are wrongly convicted of doing so), we need to avoid stacking the deck against them in a punitive way—especially since it helps ensure that they make more mistakes in the future, or otherwise suffer the consequences.
In my case, the do over I am talking about is the opportunity to come out with a new edition of my book Small Loans, Big Dreams. This is effectively the third edition of a book about microfinance that was originally published in 1996 based on field research conducted mainly during 1993-1994.
Basically, I spent countless hours following around a group of Grameen Bank borrowers in Bangladesh, and when I wasn’t doing that, I was trailing the bank’s founder Dr. Muhammad Yunus or a group of African-American women in Chicago who were borrowing from a program modelled on Grameen. After 2 years of intensive field research, I wrote up their stories to help readers understand the methods, power, context, and limitations of microfinance. The original stories still resonate, as the basic microfinance value proposition to clients has not changed fundamentally over the years.
I have always been very proud of that first edition in many ways. While it may be immodest for me to say so, I think the writing in that version was at times terrific, especially for someone who was not yet 30 years old at the time it was written. The field research was done painstakingly; few corners were cut. I did it all on a budget of less than $20,000—my advance less my agent’s very reasonable 15% commission—stretched across 2 years.
However, the book had some real limitations. Most of them were due to my lack of maturity at the time—as a writer, as a professional, and as a human being. The 2008 edition, which came out in the aftermath of Yunus and Grameen sharing the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, addressed some of those limitations. But that version was a rush job. I was running a complex organization at the time that did not afford me much time to obsess over every detail that is required to make a book as close to perfect as possible. For every immature element in the first edition that I was able to correct, it seemed that a careless error of some kind snuck in. (To take a silly and embarrassing example, in 2 places the word “hut”—intended to describe a modest rural dwelling in Bangladesh—appeared mistakenly instead as “hug.”) Bottom line: I did that edition in a hurry, and it showed.
With my 2 latest books about nonprofit leadership and management (most importantly this one) being widely available now, I began to yearn for having Small Loans not only in print again, but in an improved and updated form. It pained me to see people searching for it from time to time and being forced to purchase used copies, since it was out of print.
To address this, during the pandemic I got the legal rights to come out with a third edition back from the publisher and was able to convince Karl Weber at Rivertowns Books to work with me to do a 2022 edition. It is nearly ready to be released, and I feel great about all the improvements and all the strengths that have been retained or further embellished. Perhaps it is needless to say that the 2008 edition included lots of updates about what happened to the organizations and people mentioned in the book from 1996 to 2008, and that the new version includes extensive updates about the rather dramatic developments within Grameen and the wider microfinance movement during the last 14 years.
The cover (reproduced above) looks great, and we received a powerful endorsement quote from Andrea Jung, the president and CEO of Grameen America—an organization that is featured in this book to some extent. (It did not yet exist when the earlier editions were published.) She wrote, “This latest edition of Small Loans, Big Dreams offers fresh, new insights on the young history of microfinance in the United States. A must-read for anyone interested in the field and its evolving worldwide impact.”
There were also positive reviews of the first edition in the Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis Star Tribune (back when regional papers still did reviews of non-blockbuster titles.) The Chronicle review was one of my favorites and it included this: “Best of all, [Counts’] binational book demonstrates that microcredit isn’t an exotic quick fix, but the kind of slow, often frustrating step-by-step process that is usually the hallmark of real change.” So true!
You can buy pre-publication copies by going to the Rivertowns Books website now, or you can wait until it is up on Amazon in a few weeks. I am going to use it in a course I am co-teaching on microfinance this fall.
In life, at work, in writing, in sports, and in other pursuits, second chances don’t always come. But when they do, don’t take them for granted. Instead, embrace them and make the most of them. It took a lot of time to make this edition all it was meant to be, but I don’t regret even a single hour I spent on the project.
With the 2022 edition of Small Loans, Big Dreams: Grameen Bank and the Microfinance Revolution in Bangladesh, America, and Beyond, I have been able to put the idea of taking advantage of do-overs and second chances into practice. I hope that you consider purchasing, reading, enjoying, and reviewing the book in the weeks and months ahead. And think about what “do overs” may be available to you.
One of the opportunities and pitfalls of writing publicly about the career and life lessons you’ve learned, as I have in my 2 recent books, is that you feel a sense of obligation to practice them and a bit ashamed when you don’t.
One of the core ideas I promote is to always be engaged seriously in something you are a novice or beginner at. A related one is to try to learn a new language every 10-15 years.
Let me digress for a moment to say that all the success strategies I write about in my books are things that I have practiced and continue to practice. These are not techniques I have simply read about, researched, or dabbled in – they are ones that I have used and benefited from over the years. However, the closest I came to writing one that I was not practicing (among the 214 in the book When in Doubt, Ask for More) was the one about learning languages. At the last moment I changed the wording of that lesson from mastering a new language every 10 years to every 10-15 years, in order to give myself a chance at learning a third language within my suggested timeframe.
As I wrote in the chapter titled “Beginner’s Mind” in Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind, doing something I am a novice at helps me be more humble and more curious, and also less self-important (among other benefits). However, as I spend the month of August learning Spanish intensively, I have been reminded of the challenges of putting this idea into practice.
First, doing something you aren’t good at but want to get good at can be (at least for me) quite draining at times. Trying to keep up with the rest of my work on top of 6 hours of Spanish classes per day almost felt like too much this week. Being around people who are good at something you aren’t (yet) competent at can be humbling and frustrating. There is always a risk of engaging in more than the usual amount of negative self-talk (a trap that we all fall into) when you are the worst at something you care about, compared to those around you. (On the other hand, the sense of exhilaration when one senses progress can be an excellent antidote.)
Second, learning new skills as an adult usually takes a decent amount of time and/or money. It was one thing to become a solid intermediate cook during the pandemic, since we needed to eat, I was spending less time commuting, and it actually saved us money compared to ordering in. It’s quite another to take a month in Antigua to study a new language now that my teaching, consulting, and writing work are going full tilt. (Fortunately, the owner of the excellent school that I returned to after 17 years, San Jose el Viejo Spanish School, gave me a room upgrade that ensured access to a kitchen, so I can cook for myself most days instead of eating out, which saves a lot of money. I highly recommend this as a place to learn.)
One of the interesting things I have been wondering about while reviving my Spanish is the variability in terms of how quickly my skills erode. I have been surprised by how much Spanish I have retained after not using it much for nearly two decades. On the other hand, when I tried my hand at playing basketball recently after a long gap, my jump shot, which I charitably would have called “average” back when I played regularly, had become a pitiful, even laughable one. I’m curious about what factors contribute to some skills sticking much more than others after years of disuse.
Anyway, another technique I use is to continually think about what I want, and then to get proud of wanting those things and to start asking people for help in realizing them. Part of the trick is to not immediately dismiss anything as too expensive or difficult or otherwise unattainable to achieve. Instead, keep it alive as an idea. Sometimes a slight redefinition of what one wants, or a reconsideration about how it can be attained or who might enjoy helping you with it, can make something that feels completely out of reach to be within it.
Let me give a few examples. If you had asked me last September to name four things that I wanted but felt would be difficult to impossible to make happen and I had responded honestly, I would have probably included these 4: getting my Spanish back to the high intermediate level it was at in 2004, installing solar panels on the roof of my home, decreasing my consumption of alcohol (mostly wine) by 60% and to a level most doctors considered safe, and getting a new edition of my first major book, Small Loans, Big Dreams, published.
Well, by applying my technique and with critical support from my a)plan coach and my wife Emily, I have already accomplished one of the four, and will have the other three checked off by the end of this month. These milestones are sufficiently meaningful to me that I believe I will mark 2022 as one of the most important years of my life as a result of these breakthroughs.
What new skills are you considering developing that would require you to go through the process of being a novice? How might making a go at them make you a better nonprofit leader and person? What desires to you have that you have relegated to “unattainable” that might be easier to realize than you assume, especially if you get proud of wanting them and start asking (more) people for help with them?
I have been reading articles recently about the phenomenon of “ghosting,” such as this one in the Health/Science section of yesterday’s Washington Post. For those of you like me who are sometimes slow to pick up on cultural trends and terms, the article defines ghosting as what “happens when someone cuts off all online communication with someone else without an explanation.”
In fundraising, an example of ghosting is when a nonprofit makes a serious mistake with a donor and assumes they will never provide support again, and as a result stops engaging them completely – which can end up sealing the fate of a relationship unnecessarily. In my book Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind, I have a short section titled “Making Lemonade” where I explain that there is an opportunity to not just resurrect but to improve a relationship with a major donor after a mistake has been made, and I provide a specific example. Check it out on pages 127-129.
In this post, I’d like to reflect briefly on the benefits, in nonprofit leadership and in life, of doing the opposite of ghosting.
By way of background, I once joined a fundraising training organized by a nonprofit that I chaired the board of. The instructors asserted that nonprofits should touch base, even in a small way, with their donors every 21 days in order to ensure that those relationships don’t start to drift. When I incorporated this thumb rule into my own fundraising trainings, I noted that these contacts do not need to necessarily be time-consuming (though some should be). Anything that reminds donors why they love the nonprofit’s mission and people, even for a few minutes before they return to whatever they were doing before, will serve the purpose. In other words, don’t overthink it. (But also don’t engage in wishful thinking – sending an online or traditional newsletter that is unread does not count as a substantive contact.)
I have observed that many people, including myself in my younger days, tend to obsess about how best to express appreciation, admiration, or some other positive thought or affirmation to another person. As a result, many never get conveyed. I always encourage people, and myself, to simply go ahead and send that thank you note or mention how meaningful someone’s speech or comment was, even if you haven’t come up with the perfect way of doing so. (By the way, sometimes when you start affirming someone, the perfect words just come to you in the moment. But even if they don’t, it’s almost always better to just do it.)
It turns out there is some sound science backing this idea up. In yesterday’s Science Times (a weekly section of the New York Times focusing on science and wellness), an excellent article summarizes the underappreciated virtues of just “checking in” with friends, family, and acquaintances. The title was, “Text Your Friends. It Really Matters.” In one study featured in the article, they had people “check in” with “weak ties,” which is to say, people they knew but didn’t know that well. They asked the sender how meaningful that communication was likely to be to the receiver, and then they asked the receiver to rate how meaningful it was to them. It turns out, they were much more meaningful than the senders expected them to be.
The article concludes with some of the reasons people tend to avoid or put off these useful and helpful communications.
The bottom line: take a few moments every day to simply contact, affirm, praise, or inquire about your donors, your colleagues and former colleagues, board members (current and former), friends (even lapsed ones), acquaintances, people you know or who you suspect are going through a difficult time or recently had a major milestone, or anyone else you can think of. Don’t overthink it and don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You’ll likely make their day, or at least have a bigger positive impact than you will imagine.
Over the last several weeks I have been revising and updating my 2008 book Small Loans, Big Dreams about microfinance (which was originally published as Give Us Credit in 1996) in order to come out with a new 2022 edition in August in partnership with Rivertowns Books. It has taken more time than I imagined, and the process has provided me with an opportunity to think about my own development as a writer, professional, and human being. In particular, it has allowed me to reflect on the power of words to inspire, affirm, and hurt others.
The work of getting the new edition ready for publication had some obvious elements to it: describing what happened to the people and organizations profiled in the book since 2008, correcting some minor typos and errors, and adjusting verb tenses to reflect that it is 14 years later. Other aspects of the job have been more nuanced and thought-provoking. For example, certain terms, such as “Third World,” were in common use in the mid-2000s but have since taken on the character of being antiquated or even offensive. I replaced them with more acceptable alternatives. In some cases, expressions or analogies I used in earlier editions were arguably inappropriate when I originally wrote them, and I can only see that now. Obviously, those have been changed as well.
In other cases, I noticed how I would occasionally offer gratuitous criticism of someone else that served no literary purpose. For example, for some reason, when I mentioned a book that I liked, I was moved to write that it was “not widely read.” Why did I say something that would be hurtful to that author? I don’t really have a good answer. But I took it out this time. I will return shortly to the idea of hurtful words.
Among progressives, I am probably not the first to adopt the latest politically correct terms. On some level, I believe that being hyper-vigiilant about using the latest lingo is a poor substitute for actually doing something about social or ecological injustices. The rapid evolution of what is deemed appropriate terminology can serve as a trap for people who are too busy doing constructive things to constantly police their own speaking and keep up with the latest trends. I found this article expressed some of my thoughts on the topic very well. It explores examples of the euphemism treadmill – such as going from “pregnant woman” to “people who are pregnant” to “birthing people” – and the tendency of some people to shame others who don’t keep up. It concludes with these words that rung true for me:
“Terminology will, of course, evolve over time for various reasons. But broadly speaking, thought leaders and activists of past eras put their emphasis on what people did and said — not on ever-finer gradations of how they might have said it.
“Far better to teach people what you think they should think about something, and why, instead of classifying the way they express themselves about it as a form of disrespect or backwardness. After a while, if you teach well, they won’t be saying what you don’t want them to say. Mind you, you may not be around to see the fruits of the endeavor — a frustrating aspect of change is that it tends to happen slowly. But `Change words!’ is no watchcry for a serious progressivism.”
At the same time, I do believe in minding what one says, especially if it is clear that certain words are likely to sting. Let me conclude with two examples from my personal life.
Recently, I was spending time with several generations of a family that I spend time with. The eldest among us, who is a kind and generous person, expressed his view that it was fine to use the “n-word” since Black Americans use it among themselves. He felt that the logical inconsistency gave him license to use this term himself (and he did so while we were discussing the issue).
I began to explain to him why I disagreed. The conversation went in a different direction, so I did not complete my thought, but this was what I intended to say: The issue is not whether using or not using a word or term is logical, but whether it is hurtful. If someone I cared about told me that using the word “kangaroo” was hurtful to them, I would stop using it immediately even without any explanation about why that was the case. If a couple of other people told me the same thing, I would stop using the word entirely, and use alternatives instead. Why spread hurt unnecessarily when using a synonym can prevent it? Logic has little role to play here, or perhaps we can simply say that logic and consistency are easily trumped by kindness and sensitivity.
Here's another example. A friend of mine whose political and cultural tastes are more conservative and traditional than mine said something along these lines: If people want to pretend that they are a woman when they are really a man, why do I need to pretend as well? I thought about this view of transgender people that feels antiquated to me, and how I might explain to my friend why what he felt was “pretending” actually made sense, in a way he could relate to. This is what I came up with, which was influenced by the fact that we both love bluegrass music.
I would give him this hypothetical: What if a mutual friend whom we admired and loved as a human being was an average musician, but we all knew that he thought that he was a great musician and also that his status as a musician was important to his feelings of identity and self-worth. Would we continually remind him that we thought he was not as good a musician as he thought he was, or would we “play along” and either be silent on the issue or affirm him as the musician he thought he was? I feel confident that both my friend and I would do the latter – because the former would be unnecessarily hurtful.
So, in what we write and speak, let’s try to keep up with terms that are appropriate, but let’s spend more time working on the underlying issues involved rather than on upbraiding people who aren’t keeping up with the latest lingo. And above all, let’s avoid using words and terms that you know to be hurtful to any person or group of people based on what they signal to you, whether or not their sensitvity appears logical, understandable, consistent, or defensible to you in the moment.
And finally, let’s remember these words of Maya Angelou that I wished I had taken on board earlier in my career and life: "People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Like many people involved in nonprofit leadership and governance, I have sat through my share of directors’ meetings that were vexed by this question: How can we attract a certain type of desired individual to our board? In one case, a group I was part of wanted to add a successful Wall Street dealmaker. In another, the target was a partner at a major law firm. In yet another, it was an well-connected insider who could be our ambassador to Silicon Valley.
If those groups had had an easy way to fill such a need, they would have been debating among alternative candidates rather than wringing their hands about not having any. Indeed, they simply did not have any good contacts interested in board service and their mission within the desired talent pool. So they were stuck, at least temporarily. In one case, a governing body I served on bemoaned its failure to recruit a candidate with the desired profile in multiple meetings spanning several years. If this sounds familiar, read on.
Until recently, I thought that the only way out of such a conundrum was to doggedly network and hope that over time someone would turn up a candidate with the desired profile who also wanted to serve as a board member. Sometimes that took months, or even years. Occasionally no one ever surfaced who fit the bill. In the meantime, the directors felt that they had a significant unfilled gap, which tended to depress morale and ultimately, group performance.
However, during a consulting assignment for Civics and Service International (CSI), which until fairly recently was known as Child Steps International, I learned of another way to recruit great board members. While interviewing the board members of this organization (which is focused on civics education in Liberia), several mentioned that they had gotten involved through an unusual way: at the invitation of what one referred to as a “LinkedIn headhunter.” I was intrigued.
I asked CSI’s founder, Tenneh Johnson Kemah (who had been a graduate student of mine at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy), what this was all about. She said that some years back, CSI was in its infancy and not sure how to build its board beyond Tenneh’s friends and family. When she heard about an organization called Board Member Connect, she jumped at the opportunity to hire them to help recruit passionate, talented, and well-connected people – one fewer puzzle for this start-up to solve on its own.
As it turned out, at the point where it secured this contact with CSI in 2013, Board Member Connect was also in its infancy. CSI was among its first three clients. Using LinkedIn and its own proprietary database, Board Member Connect found three individuals who had connections to Liberia and a passionate desire to join a team that could help this struggling nation to thrive. Those directors are still involved today and were among the most receptive to my recommendations as a fund-raising consultant in late 2020 and early 2021.
At last count, Board Member Connect had completed more than 200 client engagements with nonprofits across the country. Nearly every contract has resulted in a board member meeting the specifications set by the client being successfully recruited and onboarded.
Since its early days when it helped CSI, Board Member Connect has refined its approach in many ways. Perhaps most importantly, they have developed a flexible pricing model based on how many board members an organization wants, and how narrow or broad their candidate profiles are. For example, Board Member Connect can recruit someone from Wall Street who is willing to make a $100,000 annual contribution, but it will cost considerably more than recruiting someone from the same community who is the equivalent of Vice-President or higher and has a passionate interest in your organization’s mission. If you want the candidate to be from a particular demographic with respect to age, gender, or ethnicity, that will impact the cost as well. Their typical fee is $5,500 for two successful board member recruits, though as mentioned above, that amount can vary significantly based on the terms of the search.
Board Member Connect also contracts with corporations seeking to place their executives in challenging nonprofit governance roles that can round them out as professionals prior to taking on a challenging executive role. As you can imagine, there are times when they are able to identify a nonprofit and a business that can solve each other’s problems.
Board Member Connect’s clients are diverse. They include local and national groups that span the gamut in terms of sectors. Youth development, health care, advocacy, legal services, independent schools, and workforce development nonprofits are among their satisfied customers.
Nonprofit boards of all shapes, sizes, and ages can get stuck in trying to bring in fresh blood, new perspectives, deep pockets, and specialized expertise. One of the tricks of effective leadership is to know when you need a third party to help you jump-start a stalled effort upon which your future as an organization depends, at least in part. (To learn about scores of other nonprofit leadership hacks, check out my book When in Doubt, Ask for More.)
The tendency for nonprofits to want to “do it themselves” and save money in the process is sometimes the best approach, but just as often it is short-sighted and self-defeating. Remember: there is a reason you are stuck, and it is probably that you lack some connections or capabilities essential to getting this recruitment job done to your satisfaction. Board Member Connect may be just the partner you need to build the governing body of your dreams, or at least to help you take some big steps in that direction.
Here’s a pretty fundamental question: How do you get what you want into your life? “What you want” could be anything from the kind of people you want to associate or spend time with, to landing the ideal job, to your state of health, skills, hobbies, education/degrees, moods you experience, and much more.
I find that many people, including myself at times, simply put up with what they already have in their lives – they enjoy the things they like, and tolerate or resent the things they don’t. But we all also have had the experience of making positive changes, which can take the form of resolving to improve a relationship, lose weight, learn how to play a musical instrument, creating a culture of appreciation and celebration in the organizations we work for or lead, or anything else we desire. Yet even after we achieve a goal, we often struggle to apply the lessons of our triumph to reach other aspirations.
The best framework I ever heard about making progress towards “the life of your dreams” comes from retired bestselling author and leadership expert Dave Ellis. He encourages people to repeatedly go through a 3-step process that sounds simple and easy, but actually requires a lot of discipline and a supportive mindset. It is:
(1) Figure out what you want
(2) Get proud of it
(3) Ask for help in getting it
Most people don’t spend nearly enough time really digging into exactly what they want. Their objectives remain unarticulated or (even more often) rather vague. Yes, I want to travel more – but to where, how many days per year, in what kinds of ways, with whom, and why? Yes, I want a sports car, but am I concerned about the environment impact? If so, how do I incorporate that desire within the original one to come up with exactly what I want?
Getting clear on what you want takes more time than most people are willing to devote. But the next step is also crucial: once you figure out exactly what you want, get proud of wanting it! Too often, people, including myself, have some sense of guilt or shame about wanting something. In some cases, it may be that they really don’t want that particular thing, which means they should return to step one (“figure out what you want”). But more often, they just need to embrace a desire that might appear to some people as eccentric, indulgent, or just plain weird.
My advice: get over it! Yes, some people might consider some of your desires strange. In reality, most will make no judgement at all. At least a few will admire you for speaking openly about something you want that might seem out of the mainstream (and perhaps prompt them to embrace their own unusual desire). (Of course, I am talking here about desires that are not inherently unethical, immoral, or illegal.)
The third phase – which depends a lot on completing the second one successfully – is to start asking people for help in getting it. You will find that some people can’t or won’t help you, but a certain segment will take joy in helping you reach your goal, especially if you are clear about it and even more importantly, if you are proud of it. Just put it out there and let the universe respond with assistance!
Recently, I reached or put myself on course to reach several goals that had long seemed impossible or at least elusive. They are: getting solar panels put on our roof (which should generate 6700 kwh/year once installed in about 2 months), getting back to high intermediate conversational Spanish, publishing a paperback version of my book Small Loans, Big Dreams, finding a new teaching job at a highly ranked local university, and reducing my alcohol consumption to a level that most doctors consider safe (2 drinks/day on average).
In some cases, I had been kicking myself for years about not making any progress on these goals. Then, things fell into place when I changed my mindset and my methods, and (crucially) when I began asking for help (which in one case meant signing up for an online behavior modification app).
In a discussion with my a)plan coach, I felt a desire to build on this momentum and identified 2 other goals that have seemed elusive to me. Writing this blog post is in part an exercise in sharing those goals with my readers in order to elicit their support and assistance. They are finding a place, either as a paid consultant or as a volunteer in a meaningful role, in both of the following fields:
· election reform (ensuring that all American citizens can easily and safely vote and have our government be as responsive as possible to their expressed preferences) and
· climate change (ensuring that our planet gets serious soon about achieving a livable climate through reducing our collective carbon footprint and finding creative ways to remove heat-trapping gases from the atmosphere).
I would like to find a home or platform from which to add my talents and resources to both of these important movements, ideally starting this fall or winter, after which I will have completed a number of major projects related to other goals I am committed to.
I’ll be really happy and grateful if you can provide me with some advice or assistance in achieving these goals! So, if you can help me reach these objectives, please contact me.
At the same time, I hope you take on board the message of this blog post by spending some time figuring out what you want (while ignoring the voices in your head saying that those goals are unattainable), getting proud of it (while ignoring voices saying that it is inappropriate to desire those things), and then asking people (including me) for help in attaining them. And when you reach those goals, celebrate them and use them to build your confidence and momentum in identifying and achieving other goals that are meaningful to you and to the causes that you care about.
This morning I woke up to the experience of reading a thoughtful and mixed Amazon review of my book Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind, which you can find here. Since someone who has researched Amazon reviews and how they can help or harm a book’s prospects told me that nothing except a five-star review actually helps, my first reaction was to be disappointed by this three-star review. But as I read it a second time, I was actually very pleased with it. (My equanimity was probably helped by having had so many 5-star reviews to date; thanks to everyone for posting those.)
The reviewer, someone named Liz Robinson whom I don’t believe I know, began with some praise for all the useful lessons, compelling stories, and my willingness to be self-critical. Then she pivoted to comment on some aspects of the book the seemed missing or off base. Her commentary reminded me of a review I wrote about Due Diligence, David Roodman’s excellent book on microfinance that I just re-read, and his generous and thoughtful public response to it (including things that he still disagreed with me on).
Let me briefly address Ms. Robinson’s critical comments. First, regarding issues that I did not weigh in on: In general, I limited myself in this book (and my other writings) to things that I had experiences with or strongly held views on. However, on a few issues related to race and equity, she would have liked for me to at least acknowledge certain issues, even if I did not opine on them at length. Fair enough. I might attempt to do that in a future edition.
In particular, she mentions my view that compensation for executive level positions in nonprofits (especially in medium to large size ones) should be negotiated and should take into account the needs of the executive in addition to the “market rate” for the position. Her criticism is based on an interpretation of my point to mean that executives should not negotiate hard for their full worth. In fact, I think that people with greater financial needs based on children’s educational costs, their spouse’s work (or lack thereof), historical inequities, and other factors should argue for compensation based on their full market value, if not more. Those needs are legitimate factors in the negotiation.
On the other hand, for someone like me whose wife earned an “adult” salary, who grew up in an white upper middle class American household, and who does not have children (much less children with college tuition to pay), I believe it is legitimate to factor those into an executive level compensation package. In my case, I did so by not insisting on my full market value and by giving my blessing to occasionally having other senior staff with greater needs be more highly paid than I was as the CEO. Perhaps some additional nuance about my views would have improved the book and addressed her concerns.
I don’t believe these need-based factors are relevant for compensation for lower level positions in nonprofits. Executive salaries are usually in excess of what a person needs to live on a month-to-month basis. How much more they should receive beyond their basic needs (with appropriate adjustments for cost of living in expensive urban environments) should be decided upon in a negotiation where their needs are factored in. For entry-level or mid-level positions, the market rate and the experience of the applicant should be the main (and probably only) drivers of the agreed-upon compensation package.
Ms. Robinson also wished I would have addressed or at least acknowledged the advantages I had as a white male from a rich country in my fundraising successes. While I did mention my privilege briefly at the very end of the book, I agree that additional emphasis on this issue would have been appropriate. (I should also mention that the first edition of the book was completed before the overdue racial justice awakening of 2020.)
Being a white male from the United States certainly worked to my advantage professionally in many ways. It probably also worked to my disadvantage on occasion. Without a doubt, my background has been (and continues to be) a big net plus overall, a clear unearned privilege that I enjoy. That said, it is widely acknowledged that women make the most successful fundraisers. I think some of my effectiveness in raising money came from gradually drawing from some of the feminine qualities that make women so much better. The realities experienced by people of color as fundraisers and nonprofit leaders is not something I feel qualified to comment on, but I have found articles on this subject in the Chronicle of Philanthropy and elsewhere edifying and I encourage others to explore them as I have.
As I noted above, I did take up the issue of my privilege briefly at the very end of my book. Drawing on a comment my doctor made about my good health when he said it was due to “good habits, good genes, and good luck,” I expressed the view that my professional accomplishments were due to a combination of good habits, unearned privilege, and dumb luck. I then told the reader that my book was about the one of those three factors that people have control over – their habits and more generally, their actions.
Ms. Robinson was fair in saying that the book she wanted me to write is different from the one I actually felt qualified and motivated to write (and that made it past my editor’s cuts). She was also correct that at least acknowledging some of these issues more than I did would have made the book more complete.
Thanks for this feedback and I hope to get more from readers around the world in the months ahead.
I am a big believer in people taking time to distill the lessons they have learned in their careers and in their lives and then assessing the implications of those lessons for themselves and sharing them with others. Some disciplines are very good at documenting those lessons (some call them best practices) and others, such as nonprofit management and teaching, don’t do so well.
For my part, I spent five years writing up stories (with embedded lessons) and freestanding lessons (without the stories) and they culminated in two books: Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind and When in Doubt, Ask for More, respectively. During this process, I encouraged others to write up their own career or life lessons, and was on the lookout for those who had already done so. Earlier this week I came across some great life lessons written by a man I have great respect for, and they appear below.
By way of background, early in my career I was heavily involved in trying to get the idea of microfinance into the mainstream. I found the Miami Herald under the leadership of David Lawrence uniquely helpful in this effort. Dave had gone to Bangladesh and seen the Grameen Bank in action, so it made him very open to being an ally. Years later, I reconnected with him. Across many meetings and phone calls, he was absurdly generous with advice, introductions, promotion of my books, and helping people and ideas I believed in.
Most recently, he agreed to meet with me and Marq Mitchell, a dynamic social entrepreneur working on reforming the criminal justice system (or what he would call, the “criminal legal system”) through the Fort Lauderdale organization he created, Chainless Change. (I do consulting for Marq’s group, supported in part by the visionary philanthropist Barry Segal and his team at Focus for Health.)
In the immediate aftermath of that recent meeting with Dave, he sent me the transcript of a short speech he gave and a link to a video of it. The guts of that short speech were his 12 life lessons which I found quite illuminating (especially #2, #4, #6, #8 and #9). Check them out and see which are most meaningful to you!
One: Tell people you love them while they are still here. Life can depart so quickly. Many deaths can be more or less expected. Others come as a stunning surprise -- a recent example being the loss of Paul Farmer. Let us (you and I) celebrate people and let us show love way before a funeral. May we treat all with respect, decency, kindness and, most of all, with love.
Two: Believe in people. The second President Bush warned of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” That happens often. But if we expect the best from others, the best more likely shows up.
Three: Grow spiritually. Believe in what is higher and better than yourself. For otherwise, what could be the meaning of life?
Four: Know that racism is the great cancer of society. I have been in 56 countries, and witnessed racism in every one of them. Only by confronting oneself can racism be diminished.
Five: Have the courage to speak up. Never tell so-called “jokes” that diminish others even if out of hearing range. Being thoughtful and sensitive has nothing to do with being “politically correct,” whatever that is.
Six: Be a lifelong learner – and reader (especially of history and biographies). Live all your life enveloped in the wisdom of the author Edith Wharton, who a century ago wrote this: “In spite of illness, in spite of even the arch-enemy sorrow, one can stay alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things and happy in small ways.” Know, too, that the future of our republic depends on genuinely informed people. Just last week, to underscore the point, I read that one of every six Americans believes in the so-called QAnon conspiracy. Social media should not be the single source of anything. Read widely. Read wisely. Deeply. Closely. Then make up your own mind. Be skeptical – and never cynical.
Seven: You and I cannot get through life without pain. But we can grow from pain. The way we handle pain can teach us what is really important in this world, and for the next.
Eight: Get back to people quickly – the same day, even if it is to say, “It will take me a couple of days to give you” a full enough response. Lincoln, my favorite President who grew all his life, told us: “Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.”
Nine: Believe in redemption. We are all sinners. We all make mistakes. I think, by way of example, of a truly good man in our community, a leader who messed up, “owned” it, apologized – and deserves to be remembered for all the difference he made in so many young and older lives.
Ten: Always vote for someone with an obvious moral core -- someone who can inspire us in the spirit of Mr. Lincoln’s clarion call to “the better angels of our nature.”
Eleven: Love this country. Help make us better. Listen, really listen, especially to those who see things differently than we may. The future of this great republic depends more than ever on diminishing tribalism and hatefulness. We live, and always have, in an ever-present fragility. Benjamin Franklin reminded us of that way back in 1787. What makes America “exceptional” is not bullets and billionaires, but rather that we have wanted to be a “good people.” So often we have been. But history reminds us we have been complicit in many things bad, even sometimes evil – slavery, genocide of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the 1924 immigration act, the imprisonment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans in World War II, the overthrowing of legitimately chosen leaders in such places as Iran, Congo, Guatemala, and more.
And, now, No. 12, whose wisdom I carry in my wallet. Leo Rosten, the Yiddish philosopher, wrote: “I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be ‘happy.’ I think the purpose of life,” he said, “is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you have lived at all.”
As you think about how you might apply these, also reflect on what your own 10 or so most valuable life lessons are, and how you can powerfully share them with others.
One of the original “A ha!” moments when I went through my first fundraising training was when I heard that the appropriate amount of time spent preparing for a meeting with a major donor or prospect was 4-8 hours (not including travel to and from the meeting). Up until that point, I thought that the most challenging thing was to get those meetings scheduled, and the most important part was follow up.
Once I booked an appointment with a donor, I might spend 20 minutes the day before or the day of the meeting giving some thought to the agenda and how I would conduct it. Occasionally, during those last minute cram sessions I would think about something I would have liked to have researched or planned better, but that I couldn’t due to lack of time. But up until that training, it never occurred to me that I was effectively winging it, and that my lack of preparation was making me significantly less successful as a fundraiser.
If one accepts the premise that much more preparation than many fundraisers traditionally do is warranted, as I did when I took that training, then this question arises: what on earth could you do to prepare for a meeting that would take so much time? (Incidentally, I now often spend at least an hour or two preparing for a phone call with a donor; investing 4-8 hours normally refers to an in-person cultivation or solicitation meeting.)
I have now incorporated the 4-8 hour benchmark into the fundraising trainings I deliver, and I mentioned it in my recent books on nonprofit management. People generally seem surprised by the standard, but perhaps because I am seen as an authority on fundraising, they are usually open to trying it out. For some time now, I have been promising my clients and trainees a list of things that I have done, and that other people can do, when preparing for a meeting with a current, prospective, or lapsed major donor. Well, better late than never – here’s a list of 25 preparation activities or techniques (nearly all of which I have used at one time or another):
1. Determine the goal or goals for the meeting (this can be done individually, with input from colleagues, volunteers, and others, or through some combination of both).
2. Brainstorm with staff about potential agenda items and how to present them, and how best to orchestrate the meeting to achieve the desired goals (which often involve getting the donor comfortable and talking).
3. Consult with board members and other volunteers about the donor in general, and about the purpose and plan for the meeting; focus on those people who know the donor or have at least followed their life and career, or who might be flattered to be asked to contribute ideas.
4. Determine who will be in the meeting and then involve them in planning by, for example, doing some role playing, sharing and discussing background documents, and figuring out who will take the lead in different parts of the meeting. (It is best for every person in your delegation to have a lead role in some part of the meeting – otherwise, why include them?)
5. Research what the donor has written or speeches they have made that are in the public domain, and incorporate learnings from what you find into the meeting (even in small ways).
6. Determine if bringing handouts or a slide presentation is appropriate (I normally don’t use them), and if you are going to use them, tailor them for the specific purposes of the meeting.
7. Reconfirm the meeting with the donor or their scheduler 1-2 days ahead of time.
8. Anticipate questions or objections by the donor, and think through your responses.
9. If the meeting is over a meal at a restaurant, review the menu online in advance so you don’t have to spend time figuring out what to order. (You can encourage those joining you to do the same.)
10. Learn all that you can about people who might be asked by the donor to join the meeting at the last moment, such as philanthropic advisers and family members. Remind yourself of their names and how they are pronounced, and of any prior interactions you have had with them.
11. Brainstorm what you could say to the donor that would delight them and draw them closer to you and the organization; don’t stop at 3 or 4 ideas – come up with 10-20 and then choose the very best ones to actually use.
12. Procure some small memento to present to the donor as a gift, something that represents or symbolizes the mission of the organization and/or how important they are to you and your organization. Think about the best way to present this to the donor during the meeting.
13. Review the donor’s recent online and social media activity and tweak your agenda based on what you learn.
14. Consider sending something in advance for them to read (though usually not a formal grant proposal, since it might limit your ability to present your idea and negotiate their role in supporting it).
15. Think about something you would like to ask their advice on during the meeting. It could be something you ask them for advice on in the moment, or something you ask them to give some thought to and then provide their counsel in a future meeting or phone call.
16. Closely review the contact report from the last meeting with the donor, and also at least skim prior contact reports and emails with the donor and people close to them.
17. Make sure that all the follow up items from the last meeting have been completed, and that the donor has acknowledged receiving the things that were promised.
18. Make sure that the level of detail and focus areas you are planning to present are in line with the donor’s stated and observed preferences. This can be discussed when you have a team planning session, as others may have better ideas that you do. (Planning meetings may include people who will not join the meeting but who track the relationship or otherwise may have good ideas to contribute.)
19. Coordinate among everyone in your delegation a similar dress code (business attire, business casual, etc.).
20. Determine whether there is anything that you or your organization has done since the last meeting that the donor may be disappointed by, and decide on whether you will raise that issue yourself or simply be prepared to respond if they do.
21. Make a list of things you admire about the donor that you will try to find ways to naturally include in the conversation.
22. Make sure everyone joining the meeting has the right time and place, and has directions if necessary.
23. Rehearse (even if just silently to yourself) some of the stock phrases that you may employ, such as, “I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t have the goal of ultimately making us your top nonprofit partner” or (in the case where the meeting is going off course) “Out of respect for your time, I’d like to return to the main reason we requested this meeting with you.”
24. Remind yourself of the names of any of the donor’s family members, colleagues, advisers, or friends that you have met and/or that both of you are connected to, including their receptionist (if they have one), so that you can call people by their names or reference them easily and naturally.
25. Do a Google search of the donor and any companies or nonprofits that they heavily involved in.
Are there some pitfalls from this approach? Of course there are, as is the case with almost all of the success strategies I employ and recommend. For example, an overly planned meeting can sometimes lack in spontaneity and leave your delegation unable to deal with unexpected developments. Sometimes, fundraisers feel compelled to show off how much they know about the donor, which can feel creepy. (Better to let your level of preparation come out naturally, and only when appropriate to the conversation.)
I have certainly had many successful meetings with donors that I spent less than an hour preparing for. But in general, the more you prepare, the better results you will have. Among other benefits, coming to the meeting well-prepared is often perceived as a sign of respect by the donor. As you practice this technique, you will improve your ability to use each hour spent on preparation productively, though there is always some benefit to just having an unstructured, meandering session to give breakthrough new ideas time to emerge.
The overarching themes to keep in mind in all major donor cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship, including meeting preparation, are: try to delight the donor, by all means avoid doing anything that makes them feel taken for granted by you or your organization, practice thoughtfulness and consideration, make them feel heard, and perhaps above all, appreciate them for being the philanthropist that they aspire to be (to the extent you can honestly do so).
Finally, don’t beat yourself up if you find yourself 2 days before an important meeting and have done little or nothing to prepare. Just carve out whatever time you can to plan the meeting, and use that time as productively as possible – while looking ahead in your calendar to meetings a few weeks out that you can begin preparing for now so that you can meet this benchmark that has been so helpful to me.
Editor’s note: Several months ago, I was talking to my friend Susan Stearns who has been doing a terrific job running the Pink Lemonade Project – a Vancouver, Washington-based nonprofit focused on breast cancer and that operates in Oregon and southwest Washington state. She took over as the CEO on March 2, 2020 – just before the pandemic turned everything upside down. Needless to say, this was not an easy time to take over a mission-driven organization. When she told me her story of adapting to and even thriving in such a challenging role, I asked her to write about what she did and what she learned. Her initial response is the article below containing excellent tips, techniques, and ideas about how to enhance nonprofit organizations’ resilience in today’s world. – Alex Counts
Nothing like the kickoff to a new year, and especially one heading into the second anniversary of the global pandemic, to reflect on a few traits of resilient nonprofits.
Leaders of mission-based organizations are needed now more than ever to step up and act with decisiveness. Our organizations require nimbleness to survive and thrive during these persistently challenging times. Our missions, when well-crafted and followed, offer a rallying point for people to rise above their own issues and serve others – and in so doing meet the needs of those with even greater challenges.
Indeed, the levers of the nonprofit sector are tools to maintain personal and community relevance, stability and strength. Consider drawing on the following list to improve your organization’s resilience.
10. Get your house in order—take the time to clean out your files and cabinets, de-dup your Dropbox, and consolidate/update your contact lists. With cleaned up lists, you can easily reach out to donors, thank your vendors, and reengage past participants. Make no assumptions about how your audiences have fared over the past two years. Donors could now be clients, or vice versa. Now is the perfect time to tidy up and reach out
9. Monitor your industry/market—other organizations (and in every sector) are struggling in numerous ways right now which dynamic may create new program/service gaps, or open up new donors to your organization. Others’ resources might be constrained or supply chains disrupted. Your organization’s ability to be responsive and to meet new needs in the community—those which align with your mission-- is your best case scenario. Be open to adapting.
8. Communicate your successes—in any and all ways. Might be time for more printed newsletters. Add another form of social media. It’s never been harder to grab the attention of your constituents. From zoom fatigue to news overload, your constituents are inundated. Use a combination of old school and new school formats for each campaign. Have faith that some positive stories will seep through and get noticed.
7. (Re)assess your technology and workflows. We have all used new forms of technology over the past two years. Be intentional about reviewing what you have and use. And, what functions you might be underutilizing. Invest some time to explore other linkages between applications and website that you use to increase efficiencies for your organization and business functions. Like your website, your email blast service, your event software, and bookkeeping. We proved we can work more remotely. The fundamental workflows of your organization should be reviewed and updated as well.
6. Don’t forget to team build—with remote working and less time with the entire staff together in the office, the team will need some nurturing. Add a daily 15 minute check-in zoom. Start a staff meeting with a team building question to help folks connect and learn more about each other. Both your introverts and extroverts will benefit.
5. Find and attract talent. The employment scene is wild right now. Organizations have been turned inside out, and individuals’ priorities and home lives have as well. There are un/underemployed folks who are job hunting, looking for a more flexible organization, or one where they can contribute and find meaning to serve others. Seek out the undertapped employees and engage with a part-time contract, or consulting gig to help your organization with a specific project or event.
4. Act locally. These days, the ‘think globally’ part of the expression might feel a little more overwhelming, yet the ‘act locally’ part absolutely holds true. Putting effort into your community shows results and stimulates others to reengage. And, the new irony is that in a virtual world, local is not bounded by physical geography. You and your mission define community. Seek partnerships and collaborations. Offer hope and a hand to others.
3. Focus on your mission—talk to your board, key volunteers, donors, and staff about what’s important about the mission of your organization and its heightened relevance during the pandemic. A mission-driven organization is in a unique position to rally people, bridge differences, and offer purpose to others.
2. Take care of yourself. This might never be more important than it is today. Eat healthfully. Make time for exercise. Be aware of your physical and mental health. Get enough sleep. Being worn down puts you at more risk for any number of health issues, COVID or anything else. Now is not the time to get sick.
1. Outlook matters. You get back what you put out in the world. Others’ doom and gloom is a choice. This is a crisis leadership moment and those who can inspire and create hope will attract others to a meaningful mission. Even before the pandemic, we each had only 24 hours in our day. How will you choose to spend yours? [I would love to hear from anyone who reads this far and wants to respond to this final question or provide any other feedback: susan@pinklemonadeproject.org.]