David La Piana

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.

Recently, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation convened about 30 capacity builders, from a dozen organizations, over parts of three days, to discuss the state of capacity building and how we might all work together better.

Needless to say, the economy was on everyone’s mind, with the less than cheering consensus being that the sector would not see the worst of it until 2010. Significantly, leadership development was still viewed as a key strategy, and with good reason.

All the usual modalities and strategies for nonprofit capacity building – fund raising, strategic planning, board development, etc., depend upon great leadership to accomplish their aims. So, if you have been worrying how to strengthen your organization for the gathering storm, think about the quality of your leadership, and look for ways to build upon what you have.

Join a learning community, enroll in a leadership development program, find a coach or mentor. When this storm passes it will be the well-led that survive and even thrive through bad times.

This fall, I contributed to CausePlanet.org, a great web resource for busy nonprofit professionals and leaders. The site features a range of customized information for the nonprofit leader: interpreted books, articles from thought leaders, worldwide news and resources. The new year will begin a series of articles by La Piana Associates. Once a month, we will present a topic related to our consulting work in nonprofit leadership, strategy, and organizational management. Read the articles at www.causeplanet.org and let us know what you think.

During President-elect Obama’s first press conference, a reporter asked about the first family’s choice of a puppy, which he has promised his girls. Obama said that their family needs a hypoallergenic breed since Malia is allergic to dogs, but that the family also wants to adopt a shelter dog, which presents a challenge, he added, because most shelter dogs are “mutts like me.”

I thought that was not only a very funny comment but one that demonstrated how far we have come in this election cycle on matters of race. Obama is usually referred to as our first Black president, but in fact, he is biracial. That he felt comfortable referring to himself as a person of mixed race will only make it easier for all of us to talk about this increasingly significant proportion of the American people.

The nonprofit sector also needs to have an open dialogue about the blurring realities of race and ethnicity. For example, social service providers have had to adapt both their program offerings and their communications as the population they serve becomes more diverse. While the next generation of nonprofit leadership has been widely discussed, one dimension often overlooked is that Generation Y is our country’s most racially diverse generation, which will have many implications for how nonprofits of the future approach diversity.

My colleague Jo DeBolt and I just finished a 2.5 days all staff retreat with an international client using Open Space Technology. 120 people from dozens of countries and cultures were turned loose to make their own meeting using OST principles and, as always in my experience, it worked. Management skeptics were won over and participants felt they were more engaged than generally happens in a talking head type of meeting. Google it, check it out, it’s a great tool for meeting management.

The March 6 edition of The Chronicle of Philanthropy featured a series of articles about the upcoming generational shift in nonprofit leadership. I have been keenly interested in this topic for several years so I read it the articles closely.

One aspect of the shift was the issue of whether old timers (that would be my generation) are holding back younger leaders due to a concern that the less experienced 20- and 30-somethings are really too inexperienced to lead.

I read comments from both sides of the generation gap, then recalled my own experience.

 I first became an executive director at the tender age of 26. I had very little experience, having passed through several jobs in the past year due to Prop 13-caused budget cuts, no mentoring, and few relevant skills (two years earlier I had been in grad school studying literature). Still, no one questioned whether I could lead.

It occurred to me that perhaps this was because I am a boomer, and virtually all of the nonprofits in my community were being led by relatively young people. It was just assumed I would figure it out.

Now that we boomers are starting to retire, could it be that we still assume that only our generation knows how to lead?