David La Piana

Lately I have been reading up on the factors that build resilience, both in individuals and in organizations. Pulling from several sources, both organizational and psychological, here are the top “secrets” of long-term success, in both personal and organizational life:

Be realistic, not overly optimistic. Optimists have a harder time coping with setbacks. Realists expect them. Nonprofit leaders have to be ready to guide the organization through anything.

Build strong social supports. People need to lean on one another in hard times. Nonprofit success depends on the support and mutual goodwill of colleagues.

Have faith in God or in yourself. You have to believe in something, either external or internal to yourself. Self-confidence is essential to leaders, it inspires others to believe.

Be creative and cultivate the ability to improvise on the spot. Life is unpredictable.  Seldom does anything in a nonprofit follow an expected trajectory.

Focus on the larger picture, don’t get lost in the weeds. For leaders, the details are not as important as the vision of where you are going and why. Find someone else who can take care of the small picture and dream big.

Help others to focus on the needs of others, Model and spread altruism. Nonprofit leaders need to demonstrate care for their employees. Offer them the best salaries and benefits, and the most congenial workplace, you can afford.

Practice gratitude. Remember how lucky you are, and thank others for their help.  An organization is a collection of individuals acting in concert. While the leader gets all the glory (or blame) s/he should continually recognize those who make success possible.

For a limited time, my article The Nonprofit Paradox recently published in the  Stanford Social Innovation Review is available online for free regardless of subscription.

Why are nonprofit organizations so often plagued by the very ills they aim to cure?  Read the article online, or download a PDF, and let us know what you think.

I recently had the honor of giving a keynote address, at the annual meeting of the Donors Forum, about our report Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector. It was especially meaningful for me to return to the Donors Forum, because they first invited me to speak to their members over ten years ago,  about our monograph Beyond Collaboration, back when I founded La Piana Consulting in 1998.

As Valerie Lies, President and CEO of the Donors Forum, described in her powerful opening remarks to the 600 guests of last week’s event, Chicago is struggling with many of the same economic and political challenges as the rest of the country.

I described La Piana Consulting’s NonprofitNext research and the five key trends that are converging to reshape the social sector landscape.

Joining the discussion was Mae Hong, Director of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Nicole Robinson, Director of Kraft Foods Global Community Involvement division, and Ricardo Estrada, Chicago’s First Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Family and Support Services.

The panel itself represented the future, with young and diverse leaders, whose affiliations spanned a blurring of sectors across government, philanthropic, and corporate social action.

Where will you take nonprofits next? Join the conversation today!

Bill Coy, Mary Stelletello, and I are on our way to Honolulu for the capstone graduation event with our 7th class of PONO fellows. PONO is both a Hawaiian word meaning “righteousness” and an acronym: Promoting Outstanding Nonprofit Organizations. PONO is built on our firm’s Leadership Advanced program and provides a yearlong leadership development experience for up to 15 Hawaii nonprofit executive directors.

With our PONO partner, the Hawaii Community Foundation, this fall we will launch the Hawaii Emerging Leaders Program (HELP), which will adapt our proven leadership curriculum for non-CEO leaders in nonprofits in Hawaii. These are program directors, CFOs, development directors and other senior leaders who usually report to the executive director, and who may one day be executive directors themselves.

Looking towards the nonprofit sector’s next generation of emerging leaders, be sure to check out one of Rosetta Thurman’s latest blog posts, “11 Reasons Why New College Grads Should Pursue Nonprofit Careers” and Brent Copen’s recent post about the May 2010 HBR article “The Leaders We Need Now” at  our NonprofitNext blog.

I returned recently to Stanford Law School to give a guest lecture on nonprofit strategy to a class on social entrepreneurship taught by Suzanne McKechnie Klar. Suzanne founded Build, an amazing organization that provides real-world entrepreneurial experience for at-risk youth.  It was inspiring to meet a group of our most promising future lawyers and to learn how deeply they care about social justice. We had quite a lively discussion that reinforced the thoughtfulness of smart young people and the positive impact they are going to have on the world.

Following up my recent Merging Wisely article in Stanford Social Innovation Review, I will be discussing the practical issues involved in merging nonprofit organizations at the next SSIR Live! webinar. From Nonprofit Partnerships to Mergers: How to Restructure for Success will take place Tuesday, April 6, 2010, from 11:00am – Noon PT. I plan to leave plenty of time for questions, so bring yours and join us. Register today!

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.