Leadership requires more than the confidence to stand up and offer to lead. In fact, there are three skill areas that must be built or honed for someone to truly claim the mantle of leadership.

1. Self-Awareness.

You must have an understanding and appreciation of who you are as a person, and how you manage yourself. This includes:
•   Knowing skills, limits, strengths, and competencies through realistic self-appraisal
•   Developing control, self-regulation, and an ability to “live in the response, not the stimulus,”
•   Understanding time vs. energy management
•   Maintaining a deep commitment to personal and professional growth
•   Having the ability to monitor and regulate self-efficacy

2. Understanding of Others.

Another key element of leadership requires your ability to connect and influence others.  These skills include your:
•    Capacity for deep listening
•    Development of personal voice and an ability to influence others
•    Aptitude to affirm, connect with, and correct others
•    Ability to have difficult conversations
•    High level of cultural competency
•    Ability to forge and deepen interpersonal relationships
•    Improvisational skills

3. Organizational Impact.

Leaders need to understand how to create and direct an organization beyond standard operations.  These skills include:
•    Understanding how organizations work
•    Creating organizational engagement and alignment
•    Building and directing teams
•    Thinking strategically

Given these key elements above, leadership development programs require a combination of:

Self-reflection: participants must be given an opportunity to see themselves as others see them in order to build their strengths and minimize any weaknesses in their self-presentation, communication style, or other behaviors.

Peer learning and networking:  sessions must include time for participants to connect as peers through both structured activities and exercises and through open discussion.

Hard skill development: participants must learn something new and useful during each session, such as how to manage a troublesome staff member, develop a personal performance plan, or more effectively run a board meeting.

Through research and practice, we have found that there are 5 essential program elements to build multi-dimensional leaders in a setting that builds hard skills, creates a strong peer network, and allows for self-reflection and personal growth.

The 5 essential elements of a leadership development program are:

1. Community. Both seasoned organizational leaders and emerging leaders achieve transformative learning when part of a community of peers.  The shared experience of self-examination and skill development creates a sense of shared identity for moving forward together and a mutually supportive community to draw on once the formal program ends.

2. Context. The individuals in the program must be able to leave behind for the moment their organizational context in order to explore issues, solutions, and new skills that will help them to address their work challenges. In this way they will return to their organizational home ready to practice what they have learned.  The workplace then becomes a real-life learning laboratory where new skills and confidence can be applied.

3. Clinic. Each time the learning community gathers “the clinic” provides a vital connection between practice and learning.  Based upon case study methodology borrowed from the social science/educational/  disciplines, individuals have the opportunity to present a current issue or problem they find challenging.  The community becomes a problem solving resource that sheds light on the underlying issues and provides an opportunity for problem-solving engagement for all participants.

4.  Coaching. Strong leadership programs include assessment tools as well as qualitative feedback to build self-knowledge.  Incorporating individual executive coaching allows each participant to translate data and feedback into actions to address weaknesses and reinforce strengths.

5. Curriculum. The curriculum must choose from among the wide array of topics and sub-topics related to leadership and management.  Topics must inform and build upon each other while integrating solid, proven nonprofit management and leadership practices.  The curriculum must also be applicable and understandable from a range of diverse perspectives and delivered in a manner that connects with adult learners.

We have used this holistic approach towards leadership development programs and learning communities from Honolulu Hawai’i to Fargo North Dakota. What elements do you think are most critical to a leadership development program?

But I was drawn back into the discussion when he told a story from his childhood – one about he and other neighborhood kids who competed to see how high they could swing, standing up, hoping to get enough velocity to swing the whole way around.  While attempting one of these standing 360 feats a piece of the swing broke and he fell.  He noted that he got pretty scraped up, but no attorneys got involved, there wasn’t a petition to close the playground, he (and other neighborhood kids) were just back on the swings the next day – standing – trying to swing up and over the swing set.

I thought about my own experiences (and the scars still visible on my hand and both knees) from my own childhood mishaps while at play.  But I also thought about the feeling of swinging over a creek on a vine – and making it to the other side – or those perfect summer days playing a pick-up game of ball.  In fact, most of our play was on the street or in empty lots rather than an actual playground.

It was a long drive so this took my mind to the way in which nonprofits have had to create a dynamic in which there is a BIG PROBLEM that has to be defined in order to capture donors and volunteers.  Hammond defined a “play deficit” and the “play deserts” that cause physical, emotional, and intellectual harm to our children.  He connected these to increasing rates of childhood obesity and poor school behavior and performance.  I don’t doubt this.  Play is not only about learning to get along with people, physical activity, and creativity – it’s also about risk taking and pushing the limits.  KaBOOM! has done a brilliant job of bringing a lot of resources to building playgrounds in places that need one.

However, creating this negative frame of reference always bothered me when I was running a community-based organization.  Sure, my communities were some of the poorest in the region – communities that had lost their economic heart and a lot of young residents when the steel mills closed.  But they weren’t communities without good people, good ideas, and a willingness to work.

The calamity that hit them was created by much bigger international market forces and reverberated throughout western Pennsylvania – and other steel-making places around the country.  But to get the resources needed to reshape still viable residential neighborhoods and support the remaining core of small manufacturers in the region meant defining the negatives – the deficits and deserts – and pushing the assets far down the list.

I remember a drive through one of those communities – Rankin – with Paul Grogan, who was then the President of Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC).  Paul noted that the housing stock didn’t look that bad compared to some of the other places that LISC was working.   That comment really frustrated me.  (Sorry, Paul.)  I think I answered with something like, “Does a neighborhood have to reach rock bottom before it’s worth investment?  Wouldn’t we be better off intervening while there’s still some decent housing and a neighborhood to build on?”  (LISC decided that the answer to that was “yes.”)

All of us are looking at a very difficult funding environment in which these critical questions come up every day.  More and more often foundations are asking for the ROI when they make a grant – or less elegantly – where’s the biggest bang for the buck? How big is the problem and how creative the solution?  Do you go to the biggest problems that require the most significant time and resources?  How long do you sustain the investment?  Does that influence the approach?

All big questions – and ones that make me appreciate the challenges in making these decisions.

What’s your experience been like as a grantseeker or grantmaker?  Do the deserts get all the attention at the expense of the gardens that may be facing a temporary drought and just need some water to bloom again or are the deserts so vast they can’t be ignored?

I usually bite my tongue in those situations but I am always left wondering, would your foundation buy a house and then not replace a faulty furnace or broken hot water tank? Would they buy a new car and then never change the oil or spark plugs?

The point is that when you invest in something important you take care of it, you make sure it operates smoothly and occasionally you upgrade it. You don’t just buy it and let it fall apart.

Yet the “no capacity-building” movement among funders, and its close cousin the “no indirect cost” school of thought , somehow assume that the organization’s infrastructure can run on air while the funder’s money goes into the important stuff, the program.

How many times has a funder invested heavily in a new idea only to see it fail to produce the desired outcome? The funder usually decides the innovative idea just wasn’t the right solution and moves on.

However, I know from experience that in many of these situations, the programmatic idea never had a real chance to succeed because a weak board, poor financial management practices, lack of a clear organizational identity and purpose, or similar infrastructure weaknesses doomed the program, and the organization itself, to failure.

If the funder had invested in strengthening the organizational infrastructure, as un-sexy as that might be, the innovative program idea would’ve had a better chance for success.

I have been to dozens of conferences, including every GEO meeting since 1998. GEO is great because of the people, some of my favorite people in the field seem to attend. Still, and this is no knock on GEO, it is the sad state of conferences these days that, just as in the 1970′s, and probably back to the Pleistocene, they alternate between plenary sessions and panels, and “interactive” means a 10 minute Q&A at the end. We can do better.

Next time let’s do GEO as a three day Open Space session. We could invite people to consider some big topic in philanthropy, to just come at noon the first day and make it happen. There will be no conference planning committee. There will be no proposals for workshops. There will be no agenda. There will be no celebrity plenary speaker at lunch. There will be no break out rooms. We just need one room large enough to hold all of us with lots of space to move around. We need a bank of laptops we can all use to capture our “proceedings.” And we also need a flexible caterer who can provide food throughout the day so there are no meal breaks per se. People will be having too much fun to break for meals all at once.

Open Space begins with people self-organizing an agenda. Now, that sounds hard to do on the fly with a group of several hundred people, and it does take a different type of pre-planning, as well as a cracker jack support team on site, but in the end it always works. I have never facilitated, or participated in, a failed Open Space meeting. In my experience, Open Space meetings have been by far the most meaningful.  Given the right structure and support on site, people make it work.

The GEO crowd is a great, smart, creative group of people. Let’s give them the conference they deserve – a conference they make for themselves.

But on the other hand most nonprofits rely on sources other than foundations for the bulk of their support. Giving from individuals is still being pressed by high unemployment and uncertainty, some of which may also ease as the market rises. And the largest source of revenue for nonprofits is state and local government programs, and here we see no light at the end of the tunnel, only a precipice as the states try to balance their 2010-2011budgets.

So, as the foundation community regains some of its capacity to help nonprofits, let us not forget that the public sector funding in many cases is much more critical, day in day out, to the survival of most nonprofits, and it will not be rebounding any time soon.

GEO’s conference is my favorite gathering because it is a group of people who understand the importance of building strong, sound organizations, not just funding exciting new programs. Still, going out in this curiously wild April storm seemed a bit crazy. So I was all the more surprised when I was joined at the gate by roughly a dozen Bay Area foundation folks, all waiting for the same flight.

GEO is an important part of the nonprofit sector. I must be one of a very small number of people who have attended every one of its meetings, going back, if memory serves, to 1998. The first gathering of a few dozen people in Monterey has mushroomed into an international conference with several hundred foundation leaders and capacity builders.

Despite the dramatic loss of funding for organizational effectiveness issues over the past decade GEO has grown. It publishes important resources, including our Due Diligence Tool, and in addition to the biennial gathering, convenes smaller specialized meetings on many topics. GEO enriches the sector, even if getting to the conference requires traveling through rain, sleet, or snow, it’s always worth it.

I wish I could say the same for the rest of us. Unemployment is stuck at record levels, which means, among other things, that nonprofit human service providers are stretched to the limit in many parts of the country, with less revenue and many more demands on their services. The nonprofit economy has continued to languish while the financial markets have begun to recover.  Where nonprofits are concerned, unfortunately, there is little hope for a rapid turnaround.

The largest source of income for many nonprofits is state and local government. The recession, while technically over, is still in full swing in most state legislatures. Higher unemployment means both lower tax revenues coming in and more benefits paid out. In places like California, where “dysfunctional” doesn’t begin to describe our pre-recession political system, each budget brings even more draconian cuts.

What can organized philanthropy do about all of this? Foundation funding has in the past been a highly strategic part of the sector’s sustainability.  It needs to play that role again today. Foundations are loathe to “play God,” deciding which nonprofits will live and which will die, but the time has come to place some bets.

As the sector continues to witness the financial collapse of not just marginal performers but important nonprofits, funders can ask “Which groups are too important for us to lose?”  Foundations should identify their top picks, the organizations their communities and fields cannot live without, and invest in strengthening those groups. This does not necessarily mean picking up the tab for government funding cutbacks, but helping these essential groups to rethink their business model, restructure their management and service delivery, and perhaps even join forces with others to withstand the storm.

A few foundations have launched initiatives to help key grantees rethink their models. It is time for the foundation community at large to jump in.

Walt Shill, head of the North American practice for Accenture, is quite blunt: “Strategy, as we knew it, is dead. Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision making are much more important than simply predicting the future.” Corporate planners are increasingly revising their forecasts monthly, but this too is the wrong solution in my opinion. It consists of continually moving the goal posts. When you first miss your numbers, recast them. Next month, repeat.

It is great to see corporate America, and consulting giants like Accenture, beginning to see the problems with long-term static planning approaches to strategy. We identified similar problems in the nonprofit sector years ago and prescribed a better approach to strategy, our Real-Time Strategic Planning methodology, which was described in The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution in 2008. Sometimes our sector leads the way! In this work we describe an ongoing strategy process designed to anticipate and respond to challenges and opportunities as they emerge.