David La Piana

My friend and colleague Shiree Teng recently sent me a fascinating article on the role of racial assumptions in leadership development.

The article was created by Leadership for a New Era, a collaborative research initiative launched by the Leadership Learning Community, and examines the assumptions behind current approaches to leadership development, principally a focus on individuals.

According to this piece, American society is fully bought into a view of leadership based on the following principles:

• Personal responsibility and individualism: The belief that people control their fates regardless of social position and that individual behaviors and choices determine material outcomes.

• Meritocracy: The belief that resources and opportunities are distributed according to talent and effort and that social components of “merit”—such as access to inside information of powerful social networks, are of lesser importance or do not matter.
• Equal opportunity: The belief that employment, education and wealth accumulation are “level playing fields” and that race is no longer a barrier to progress in these areas.

As a result, we ignore the underlying unfairness of in-crowd status that the majority culture enjoys. Essentially, everyone is expected to work from a level playing field but the field is anything but level. Yet people from other cultures and backgrounds (not Northern European) often do not have access to the networks and information that allow majority culture members to, or example, easily walk into a new work situation and know the “social rules” that will allow them to get ahead.

Where this set of observations is most poignant for me is in its ramifications for leadership development training. Leadership development that focuses on individuals, usually CEOs, assumes that everyone is in the same position relative to using the information gained from the experience. Yet the subtle ways in which dialogue, work processes and even humor in the work place are reinforcing of dominant culture practices does indeed make entry harder for others. An awareness of this dynamic, and efforts to bring together teams and communities for leadership development, could work against this bias.

May Pagsinohin is the Executive Director of the Philippine Science Centrum, the only informal science learning center in the Philippines. She is also a participant in a Noyce Leadership Institute development program for which I am faculty.

A few weeks ago May’s center was inundated with ten feet of water in the first of four typhoons to hit her country in rapid succession. May was not present at the time but 250 school children were. Her staff bravely escorted the kids out of the building and onto buses before the flood arrived, but not in time for the staff themselves to escape. Several staff, wet, cold and hungry, were trapped in the building for 15 hours before rescue workers got to them. Fortunately, they all survived.

The center, built of concrete block, also survived, but was full of mud. The science exhibits were all destroyed. Since that day May has worked tirelessly to restore her center, support her staff, and return things as much to as possible to normal. And she lives up to her commitments.

May made it to our recent leadership program meeting in Texas, where she was hailed for her bravery by her fellow leaders. We all wish her the best as she returns home, with hopes that she continues to weather any future storms.

While traveling in Texas recently, I ran into Peter Friess of the Tech Museum of Innovation. I originally met Peter when he participated as a Fellow in Cohort 1 of the Noyce Leadership Institute, an international, year-long, leadership development program for science center CEOs, for which I serve as core faculty.

More recently, we also interviewed Peter as part of our NonprofitNext research initiative, and profiled the Tech Museum in the new Convergence report.

Peter was in Fort Worth to attend a reunion of his Noyce cohort in conjunction with the annual Association of Science and Technology Centers conference. I was in Fort Worth working with Cohort 2, and to do a workshop on governance at the same conference.

Simply put, Peter is brilliant. Originally trained in Germany as a watchmaker, he went on to earn a doctorate in science education and to lead the Deutsches Museum in Bonn as well as to work at the Getty and the Smithsonian. But I’m writing this post because I wanted to share his latest venture with you.

He calls it “Gallery Without Labels.” At each exhibit/experiment in the museum, instead of a placard explaining the thing, there is a video monitor. You choose the language you want and a child from that ethnic/language group comes on the monitor explaining how the exhibit works while he/she is actually doing it. This gets around language barriers and literacy levels. It makes everyone feel welcome. Apple is an underwriter. For added impact, in the lobby they have 30 video monitors with all the different kids doing their thing simultaneously. It models dynamic community engagement.

What better way to recruit the next generation of innovative museum goers than to show them leading the way?

Recently I was asked to judge for the 5th Annual Young Nonprofit Leaders Awards given by Young Nonprofit Professionals Network. This is quite an honor, as I told the organizers, not least because it has indeed been a long time since I could qualify for membership in this group. I do not know what the exact age cut-off is, but I am pretty sure that I am way past it.

This request made me start thinking about the evolution of leadership development in the field. When I was a 26 year old nonprofit leader I was pretty much expected to learn on my own, kind of a sink or swim approach. This was largely true of my generation: we had no specific management training (I had a BA and MA in comparative literature), and sometimes we had no actual experience in the field. We spent a lot of time on the phone asking other, slightly less clueless colleagues questions, and we grew organizations through a lot of trial and error.

This approach fit with my generation’s “do your own thing” approach to life but I am not so sure it benefited our organizations. Back then we figured things out but trial and error is costly when you are on the thin margins of a small nonprofit.

These days more nonprofit leaders have specific training, often a masters in business or public or nonprofit administration, and once in the job they increasingly participate in programs that further develop their leadership and management abilities.

It is more than a bit ironic that having never participated in or benefited from any leadership development effort when I was new to the field, I now spend a great deal of time leading these programs. I’m glad the sector and I have evolved and I look forward to where the next generation will lead us.

I read today that Jeffrey Raikes, new CEO of the Gates Foundation, offered to work for free, as Patty Stonesifer did before him, but the founders did not want to set a precedent. Raikes, like Stonesifer, is a Microsoft millionaire with a second career in philanthropy. The noteworthy element is the level at which Raikes pay was set – $990,000. This apparently is what Bill and Melinda Gates think is a reasonable salary to attract future CEOs. I’ll say!

While this is taking place, virtually every nonprofit leader in America is either taking a pay cut or contemplating one, laying people off or contemplating the need to do so, and looking under the mat for spare change in an effort to keep essential services flowing. I don’t begrudge foundations paying their CEOs lots of money, even if the job cannot be anywhere near as hard as running a soup kitchen. What I do resent is the clamor every time a nonprofit leader asks for a raise or, after a lifetime of service, breaks six figures. No one goes into the nonprofit field for the money, but people do have to live.

For many years I have been giving talks on various topics at the annual Craigslist Foundation Nonprofit Boot Camp. I usually feel these sessions are pretty well received and several of them live on as podcasts at the Craigslist Foundation web site.

Recently I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that one of these talks, from 2007, entitled “How to Succeed as a Nonprofit Executive Director” is the most popular podcast from all past Boot Camps. In fact, it has been downloaded more than 5,000 times!

And if that isn’t enough for you, my most recent Boot Camp presentation, from this past summer, on Real-Time Strategic Planning, was just uploaded on the site as well.

Check it out and tell me what you think!

One of the many joys of my job is to have a regular opportunity to meet lots of interesting and creative people who are trying to change the world. This week is typical.

Ben Paul of Communiteach. He is creating a forum for people to both sign up for learning opportunities and offer to teach others the special skills they possess. It is a kind of barter system for education and a very cool idea.

Linda Raybin, Managing Director of Community Foundation Services for The Council on Foundations. She has an exciting initiative she is starting in order to help community foundations to be as strategic as possible as they move through the recession.

Jeff Malloy, Director of Finance and Administration at the James Irvine Foundation. We spoke regarding a new initiative the foundation has launched to help its grantees with financial restructuring. We have been invited to serve as the Foundation’s consulting partner in this endeavor and are very excited about the possibilities this presents for real change among some key nonprofits in California.

Shiree Teng of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. She is doing a retrospective of the organizational effectiveness movement. It turns out, by complete happenstance, that I was there at the inception, or is it conception, of the concept. In fact my firm was born out of the first stirrings of the OE movement, with Irvine, Packard and Hewlett as the original investors.

Eleanor Clement Glass, Chief of Donor Engagement and Giving at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. She is a long time colleague of probably twenty years. We spoke about the state of affairs in her community’s nonprofits and a variety of ideas for helping them through this difficult time.

Exciting conversations with dynamic people. Like I said, I have many joys in my job!

We recently concluded the launch week of Noyce Leadership Institute’s second cohort, for which I am a core faculty member, with responsibility for governance and strategy curriculum elements.

Seventeen CEOs of science centers from around the world came to Seattle for a jam-packed week of leadership development activities. Leaders from Alabama, California, Canada, Czech Republic , D.C., France, Israel, Louisiana, New York, Pennsylvania, the Philippines, South Carolina, Texas and the UK came together to form a new learning community for the next year.

At week’s end we are all both exhausted and exhilarated. NLI is sponsored by the Noyce Foundation, with additional support from public and private sources. It is a privilege to be a part of this great group’s journey.

I just returned from Fargo, North Dakota, where we are launching a two-year large scale capacity building effort that aims to transform the state’s nonprofit sector.

We’ll be leading capacity building workshops, board development trainings, and board assessments – for cohorts of our proven Leadership Advanced executive development program, here to be called Leadership Advanced North Dakota (LAND). The program is sponsored by the Impact Foundation, with major funding from the Bush Foundation in Minneapolis.

This was my first trip to North Dakota – in February – and I found it a stunning, cold, beautiful place of wide open vistas, full of dedicated people who are willing to take big risks to get things done. North Dakota is a large land mass, but has only 600,000 people, and most of the state has fewer than 6 people per square mile.

The challenge of meeting the needs of an aging population in a rural context will be daunting, but with the partners we have, and the resources committed to the effort, we are excited about the possibilities for developing a new model for nonprofit capacity building. Stay tuned.

Last week our PONO team met with 50-60 current and former participants in our leadership development program in Hawaii for our annual reunion.

This year’s theme, no surprise, is “How are you coping in the current economy?” I made a few introductory remarks to start the ball rolling before we broke into small groups to have the participants tackle this very current question. Here is a recap of my remarks:

Five steps to managing in a difficult economy

1. As always, be true to your mission. Avoid the temptation of mission creep – “easy dollars” that are available in an area you have no business going into.

2. If you need to cut back do it strategically, not across the board. Invest your flexible dollars, if any, in the most impactful and sustainable places and cut back or eliminate marginal areas of work. The key is to position your organization for long term success – this too shall pass. If you prune selectively you could emerge even stronger in a couple of years.

3. Communicate regularly with your board, staff, volunteers, funders, constituents, etc. Let them know your thinking, what you see coming down the pike, how you plan to respond, and show them that you, personally, never lose heart, even when you want to. Remember the Stockdale Paradox – an unflinching look at the current terrible situation coupled with optimism that you will prevail. Communication is more important now than ever.

4. Don’t cut back in small bits. If you have to do layoffs, do them all at once and reassure the survivors that, for now at least, you are solid. Nothing kills morale better than a series of monthly layoffs.

5. Look for growth opportunities. That’s right, even in bad times a sizeable percentage of nonprofits manage to grow. They identify new needs, they fill gaps created by the failure or cut back of others, and they position themselves as part of the solution.