Tag Archives: nonprofit leadership

Nonprofit Radio for October 3, 2022: Your Dismantling Racism Journey

 

Pratichi ShahYour Dismantling Racism Journey

Starting with your people, your culture and your leadership, how do you identify, talk about and begin to break down inequitable structures in your nonprofit? My guest is Pratichi Shah, founder & CEO at Flourish Talent Management Solutions. (Originally aired 7/8/20)

 

 

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[00:01:58.44] spk_0:
Hello and welcome to Tony-Martignetti non profit radio big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast and oh, I’m glad you’re with me, I’d be thrown into necro psychosis if you killed me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. You’re dismantling racism journey starting with your people, your culture and your leadership. How do you identify? Talk about and begin to break down inequitable structures in your nonprofit. My guest is pretty itchy Shah founder and Ceo at flourished Talent management Solutions. This originally aired july 8th 2020 on Tony’s take two, let’s debunk plan to giving myths. We’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o and by fourth dimension technologies I tion for in a box. The affordable tech solution for nonprofits. tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant four D just like three D but they go one dimension deeper here is your dismantling racism journey. It’s a real pleasure to welcome welcome. I’m not welcoming. I’m welcoming, I’m welcoming, she’s an HR strategist and thought leader with 25 years experience in all aspects of talent management. She’s making her face when I say 25 years human resources equity and inclusion and organizational development in the nonprofit and for profit arenas. She’s founder and Ceo of flourish Talent management Solutions. The company is at flourish tMS dot com. Welcome to the show.

[00:02:10.09] spk_1:
Thank you so much tony I appreciate being here.

[00:02:14.25] spk_0:
It’s a pleasure pleasure to have you um and I’d like to Jump right in if you’re, if you’re ready. Um,

[00:02:20.35] spk_1:
absolutely.

[00:02:48.05] spk_0:
You know, racism and white privilege most often look very benign on their face. Um, I had a guest explain why use of the word professional in a job description is racist. I had a more recently, I had a guest explain how not listing a salary range in a job description was felt racist to them. So how do we begin to uncover what is inequitable and right under our noses yet not visible on its face?

[00:03:34.85] spk_1:
Yeah. You know what it often it starts with listening. I mean to state state a bit of the obvious. It really does start with listening. It’s understanding for organizations. It’s understanding where we are. Um, so it’s listening to the voices that may not have been centered. We’ve become better as organizations and being responsive to staff. I hear that a lot kind of, hey, this is what my staff is telling me. This is what we need to do. But the question is is are you responding to the voices that have possibly been marginalized? Likely been marginalized or oppressed in the past joe. General responsiveness is not the same as centering the voices that really need to be heard. So it’s first off just understanding where you are as an organization and listening to the people who may have experienced organization in a way that is different than you think.

[00:03:50.19] spk_0:
So when you say general responsiveness is not what not adequate, not what we’re looking for. What do you mean by that?

[00:04:45.05] spk_1:
So a lot of time the voices that are saying, hey something’s wrong or we need to do this or we need to do that are not the voices of those that have been marginalized and oppressed. They tend to be maybe the loudest voices. They’re speaking maybe from a place of privilege and that needs to be taken into account. So being responsive, for instance, if the I call it kind of the the almond milk issue being responsive to a staff that says in addition to dairy milk for coffee. This is back when we were in fiscal offices, um, we need almond milk too. But the question is is are we listening to the voices of those that weren’t able to consume the dairy milk? It’s not a perfect metaphor. It’s not a perfect analogy because that one ignores actual pain and it just talks about preference. But are we list listen to the voices of people that have been oppressed who have, who have been, who have heard the word professional or professionalism wielded against them as a, as an obstacle in their path to success in their path to career advancement. Those are the voices that we need to listen to not the ones who have a preference for one thing or another.

[00:05:08.34] spk_0:
Um let’s be explicit about how we identify who, who holds these voices, who are these people?

[00:06:03.47] spk_1:
It’s people that have have come from. It’s particularly right now when we talk about anti black racism, we need to center the voices of those from the black community. And that means those who have either maybe not joined, not just not joined our organization for particular reasons, but maybe they have not joined our board. Maybe they have not participated in our programs, Maybe they haven’t had the chance to. So it’s really from an organizational perspective, think of it as understanding what our current state is. So how does your organization move people up? Move people in move people out if we don’t have the voices in the first place? Because maybe we’re not as welcoming as we should be, then what does the data tell us about? Who’s coming into our organization? Who’s leaving our organization, Who’s able to move up into our organization, what our leadership looks like, what our board looks like. So at times the fact that there is an absence of voice is telling in and of itself and our data needs to be able to explain what is going on. So that data needs to be looked at as well.

[00:06:52.58] spk_0:
Alright, so we need to very well, good chance we need to look outside our organization. You’re talking about people that we’ve turned down for board board positions turned down for employment? Um, I’m not even gonna say turn down for promotion because that would presume that they’re still that that presumes are still in the organization, But I’m talking about very likely going outside the organization. People who don’t work with us, who aren’t volunteering, who aren’t supporting us in any way, but we’ve marginalized them. We’ve cast them out before they even had a chance to get in

[00:07:10.44] spk_1:
potentially. Yeah. And then actually probably probably there is something that they have not found palatable or appealing about working with us or being a sensor or being uh to your point of volunteer. So so we need we need to look at why that’s happening.

[00:07:36.46] spk_0:
Okay. I’ve gotta I gotta drill down even further. How are we gonna identify these people within within our organization as it is? How are we gonna figure out which people these are that we’ve marginalize these voices of color over the let’s just like in the past five years, what have we if we’ve done this? How do we identify the people we’ve done it to?

[00:08:33.53] spk_1:
Yeah. It’s a really it’s a complicated question. It will differ by organization, right? It differs by what your subsector is, how things flow within a subsector. The size of the organization. A really good place to start is understanding who has turned us down, why have people left? So take a look at exit interviews. Even if you’re not doing exit interviews, we know that there is not always uh an HR presence in a lot of our organizations. If there aren’t formal exit interviews, first of all, let’s make time for those because we need to understand why people are leaving. Um but if if there isn’t a formal HR presence, what do we know about the circumstances under which someone left organization or said no to a job offer or said no to a board position or a volunteer. It’s also important to ask, expanding our definition of stakeholder groups, engaging with all of our stakeholder groups as as broadly defined as possible. And within those groups, understanding are we reaching out to a diverse audience to say why would you engage with us? Why would you not engage with us in any of those roles? So, yeah, it’s gonna be a little bit harder to understand the people who are not there because they’re not there.

[00:09:02.40] spk_0:
Yeah. Okay, Alright, so, alright, um we go through this exercise and and we identify we’ve identified a dozen people, um they’re not they’re not currently connected to us and uh it may be that they have had a bad experience with us, that they may have turned us down for employment because they got offered more money somewhere else. That could that in itself could be, let’s

[00:09:18.28] spk_1:
say that

[00:10:08.31] spk_0:
in itself could be uh not something other than benign, um but let’s say they moved out of the state, you know, they were they were thinking about, so, so in some cases they may not have a bad have had a bad experience with us, but in but in lots of cases they may have, they may have turned down that board position because they saw the current composition of the board and they didn’t feel they felt like uh maybe being an offer, you know, a token slot or whatever, whatever it might be. I’m just, I’m just suggesting that some of the, some of the feelings toward the organization might not be negative, but some might very well be negative of these dozen people we’ve identified in all these different stakeholder or potential stakeholder roles that they could have had. Um what do we reach out to them and say, how do we, how do we get them to join a conversation with an organization that they may feel unwelcome him?

[00:11:21.79] spk_1:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And and I think right now, especially we tread carefully. Um we tried carefully and we honored the fact that they in fact might be getting that same question from many other other organizations, friends, colleagues, family members, in which people want to understand something. What we’re seeking to do is not be educated on the overall picture of white privilege, white supremacy of dominant narrative and dominant culture. That’s on us. That’s on all of us individually to understand that, that is not the member that is not up to. The member is of oppressed societies to have to tell us that, Right? So what they, what we want to understand is kind of, what did you experience with our organization? What was the good? What was bad? And first of all, do you even want to engage with us. Is this not a good time to do that because they’re already exhausted. I said to a colleague recently, you know, we can’t even understand the reality of what it’s like to live there to live that reality and for many to lead the charge, right? Because they’re also showing leadership in the movement. So to we can’t even understand what those layers of existence are like. So I think it’s treading very carefully and should we have the ability to engage with someone because they have the space, the energy, the desire. Then I think it’s understanding and asking kind of what’s going on for us? What where did you find us either not appealing or where did you? Why did you not want to work with us in whatever capacity we were asking? And it’s asking that question.

[00:11:50.37] spk_0:
Okay, well that’s further down. I’m just trying to get to like what’s the initial email invitation look like?

[00:11:55.10] spk_1:
It depends on the organization. It depends on the organization. It depends on the relationship. I wouldn’t presume to give words to that to be honest with you because because I think it also depends on the person that you’re asking. I don’t want to offer kind of a blanket response and inadvertently tokenized people by saying, oh, of course you’re gonna want to engage with us. So I really think it’s dependent on the situation.

[00:13:35.19] spk_0:
It’s time for a break. Turn to communications. They had a very smart newsletter this week. We often can’t predict news outcomes, but we often do know news is coming, for instance, hurricanes during hurricane season, the Duffy decision on abortion and the november midterm elections. We know in advance that there’s going to be this news. The smart nonprofits turn to communication says prepare talking points for all the possible outcomes in advance and they’re the ones that get the day one quotes and the op EDS and they own the issue on social media. So prepare your messaging in advance, then launch when the news breaks. It’s brilliant turn to communications. Your story is their mission. You can get their newsletter which is on message at turn hyphen two dot c o. Brilliant. Now, back to your dismantling racism journey. What are you inviting them to do with you have a conversation, share your experience with us, is it?

[00:14:42.37] spk_1:
Yeah, essentially. I mean, that’s what it boils down to. But again, it really depends on where the organization is. Right. So this is your data collection moment. This is information collection. Where else are you collecting information? What what else do you know? What other steps have you taken to begin that educational process because there’s there’s kind of a dual purpose here, right? It’s understanding who we are in, where we have contributed to structural racism, to pretend to a culture of that does not support differing viewpoints, differing populations, that is in some ways upholding white supremacy or is completely holding upholding white supremacy and its culture, there’s that general education of understanding all of that and then there’s understanding what our organization’s role is, right? So it’s both. And um so it’s really highly dependent upon where is the organization uh case for us, who you’ve talked to? The head of Equity in the center describes a cycle that is brilliant um around awake too, woke to work. Where are you in that cycle? Are you, where are you on? Um where are you and being pluralistic? Where are you and being inclusive? All of those things depend on what you’ll ask and how you’ll reach out and if you even should reach out there maybe work that has to be done internally before that reach out can happen again, just being considerate and sensitive of those who are willing to talk to.

[00:15:09.48] spk_0:
Yeah. Kay was our guest for the last most recent special episode on this exact same subject. Thank you.

[00:15:16.71] spk_1:
Yeah. The the organization is doing and has been since its inception has been doing incredible work. K is leading that work. Um and and both her words always contain wisdom and the products that they’ve put out are extraordinary.

[00:15:48.30] spk_0:
How about in your work are you facilitating the kinds of conversations in your practice that you and I are talking about right now, Do you you bring these outside folks in sometimes too to to have these conversations

[00:16:16.58] spk_1:
sometimes. Yeah, sometimes again being highly respectful of if they didn’t want to engage with us, do they even want to talk to us right now? My work really is around um, having an organization understand where it is right now. So what is its current state? What is the desired future state? Right. So we know that we want to be a racially inclusive, racially equitable organization likely that’s already been defined. But what does that mean for us as an organization if it means solely in numbers piece right? Like we want to be more divorces aboard. Okay, that’s fine. But beyond that, how will we make ourselves have a board culture that is appealing to those people that we want to bring in to work with us? So it’s kind of defining both current state and understanding current state to finding future state and then developing the strategy to get there.

[00:17:00.63] spk_0:
Okay. And now you and I are talking about, you said you know, we’re still data gathering, so we’re still defining the current culture as it exists. Right. Okay. Okay. And your work, you you centered around people, culture and leadership. Can we focus on leadership? I feel like everything trickles down from

[00:17:05.04] spk_1:
there.

[00:17:27.69] spk_0:
I don’t know. Are we okay. Are you okay, Starting with a leadership conversation or you’d rather start somewhere else? Okay. Um, so what what is it we’re looking for leaders of our listeners of small and midsize nonprofits to, to commit to you.

[00:17:30.41] spk_1:
I think it’s first of all committing to their own

[00:17:32.40] spk_0:
learning

[00:17:33.56] spk_1:
and, and not relying on communities of color to provide that learning. Right? Again, Going back to what we said earlier, it’s not relying on those who have been harmed or oppressed to provide the learning. So first of all, it’s an individual journey that’s a given. Okay. Um,

[00:18:32.11] spk_0:
can I, can I like to like things like people, I like action steps. Okay. So we’re talking about our individual journey, our own learning. I mean, I’ve been doing some of this recently by watching Youtube, watching, um, folks on Youtube of course. Now I now I can’t remember the names of people, but no Eddie Glaude. Um, so Eddie Glaude is a commentator on MSNBC. He’s just written a just released this last week, uh, biography, well, not so much a biography of James baldwin, but, but an explanation of baldwin’s journey around racism. Um, so that’s one example of, you know, who I’ve been listening to. So we were talking about educating like learning from thought leaders around yeah, privilege structures, whether reading books listening to podcasts.

[00:19:00.76] spk_1:
Absolutely. It’s around, it’s around structures, but it’s also understanding things that we do all the time in organizations and how I as a leader might perpetuate those, right? So it’s sometimes the use of language to your point about the use of the word professional. Um, language tends to create our reality. So, and and it either language will build a bridge or not. So how do we use our language? How do we use our descriptors? How do I show up as a leader? Um, as in my own kind of inclusion or not? So, I think it is absolutely that it is looking at thought leaders around things like structural racism, around the use of language around people’s individual experiences to get that insight and depth, because it’s not just an intellectual exercise. This is emotional, too, and therefore has to have emotional resonance.

[00:20:10.42] spk_0:
Okay, thank you for letting me dive deeper into what about personal, you know, your own personal journey, your own personal education, uh, fact finding and introspection. You’re talking about something, you know, and it’s no, no revelation. This is it’s difficult. It’s painful. You know, you you’re very likely uncovering how you offended someone, uh, how you offended a group. Um, if you were, you know, speaking in public and something comes to mind or how you offended someone in meetings or, you know, multiplied. I don’t know how many times. I mean, this introspection is likely painful,

[00:20:12.44] spk_1:
likely likely. Yeah, more often. More often than not, I can’t I can’t really envision it. Not at some level being painful.

[00:20:21.92] spk_0:
Yeah. But you’ve caused pain. You know, that there’s a recognition there. Yeah,

[00:20:27.16] spk_1:
exactly,

[00:20:27.62] spk_0:
painful for you. But let’s consider the pain of the person or the group that you.

[00:20:33.80] spk_1:
Exactly, right. I

[00:20:34.78] spk_0:
don’t know, offended, stereotyped, mean to put off, you know, whatever it is, you’re

[00:20:40.73] spk_1:
that’s right. And that that’s why the work as much as I know, you know, to some degree, people want this to be work that can be kind of project managed if you will or it can be put into a process or a series of best practices or benchmarks

[00:20:53.94] spk_0:
to

[00:21:05.75] spk_1:
some degree, not very much, but to some degree. Yes, absolutely. The some a little bit of that can happen, but that in and of itself is a bit of a dominant narrative, right? That in and of itself is kind that that centering white culture. So I think what we need to understand is this is not just going to be again to sorry to be redundant, but it’s not just gonna be intellectual. The fact that pain has been caused dictates that this be emotionally owned as well. It can’t be arms length. It can’t be just intellectually owned with a project plan that I keep over here on a chalkboard or something like that.

[00:21:41.49] spk_0:
Emotionally owned. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Um All right. So I made you digress and deeper. What else, what else you wanna tell us about leadership’s commitment and and and the importance of leadership commitment.

[00:23:23.38] spk_1:
Yeah. So, so it needs to be explicit. It needs to be authentic. It needs to be baked into the leadership. Whatever leadership structure of the organization has, it needs to be an ongoing piece of that leadership. So it’s not a, hey, let’s touch base on our quote inclusion initiative. If it’s an initiative first of all, that’s not really doing the work anyway. Um but it’s not something that lives separately from ourselves. Let’s have HR kind of check in on this or let’s have the operations person check in on this, that that’s not what this is about. It’s really, it’s authentically being owned by leadership to say, yeah, I know it’s gonna be painful. And in looking at our organization, we’re gonna need to understand why our leadership is remarkably homogeneous. Which in the case of many nonprofits, it is if you take a look at Building movement project and the unbelievably great work that they’ve done twice now, they just put out an update to their leadership work around how people move through the sector or don’t and how people communities of color and people of color are represented in our leadership. We can begin to understand that by and large, they’re they’re not. Um though i that is an oversimplification in some ways. So I would encourage people to go to building movement Project’s website and check out their work. Um but you know what, why are we so homogeneous? Why is our board? So homogeneous? It’s it’s also unpacking and uncovering that. So to your point earlier about, you know, how do we look at people and how they move through the organization. This is where you look at Who is present, right? Not just who’s not with us, but who is with us? How do people get promoted? How does that system work? Does any does everyone have the same information? Is it a case of unwritten rules? Is it a case of some people move up because they’re similar or they have 10 years of experience, which is something that we like to say.

[00:23:45.71] spk_0:
How

[00:24:08.90] spk_1:
Do you get 10 years of experience if you’ve not been given those chances to begin with? So is there life experience that we can that we can begin to integrate in our conversations? Because life experience is equally valuable. Are we putting too much of a premium on higher education, education and its formal kind of traditional form. Are we putting too much of a of an emphasis on pedigree of other kinds of those, those are the things that ultimately keep people out. So taking a look at leadership and and having leadership commitment ultimately means looking at all of those things, there’s an overlap and how we look at leadership or people and or organizational culture.

[00:24:24.52] spk_0:
Yeah, yeah, of course, this is a it’s a continuum or

[00:24:27.44] spk_1:
Absolutely, absolutely. And the areas bleed into each other.

[00:24:38.31] spk_0:
Yeah, of course, yeah. Um, you know, subsumed in all this, I guess. I mean, it’s okay for leaders to say, I don’t know where the where the journey is going. I don’t know what we’re going to uncover, but I’m committed to having this journey and leading it and and right. I mean, supporting it, but I don’t know what we’re going to find.

[00:24:54.28] spk_1:
Uh

[00:24:55.50] spk_0:
Right,

[00:24:56.39] spk_1:
right. And that in and of itself can be uncomfortable for a lot of people. And that’s the that’s the kind of discomfort we need to get okay with.

[00:25:03.34] spk_0:
Yeah. Alright. Yeah. This, you know, I had I had a guest explained that this is not as you were alluding to, uh it’s not the kind of thing that, you know, we’re gonna have a weekly meeting and will be these outcomes at the end of every meeting, then we’ll have this list of activities and, you know, that then, you know, it’s how come it’s not like that. How come we can’t do it like that

[00:25:26.67] spk_1:
because we’re dealing with hundreds and hundreds of years of history, and it’s because we haven’t been inclusive in the ways that we do things and we haven’t allowed whole selves to show up that it is um It’s complicated and it’s messy because it’s human.

[00:25:44.56] spk_0:
Alright. So it’s not gonna be as simple as our budget meetings.

[00:25:48.62] spk_1:
Absolutely different. Different kind of hard.

[00:25:52.76] spk_0:
Alright. And we’re gonna have an outcome at every at every juncture at every step or every week or every month or something. That’s

[00:25:58.65] spk_1:
right. That’s right. And if we expect it to go that way. Um We are likely going to give ourselves excuses not to press on

[00:26:56.36] spk_0:
it’s time for a break, fourth dimension technologies. Are you seeing technology as an investment, an investment in your people, the people you’re helping, the people who work for you, the people who support you, an investment in your sustainability and investment in your programs four D. Can help you make better tech investment decisions. Check them out on the listener landing page at Just like three D. But you know, they go one dimension deeper. Let’s return shall we to your dismantling racism journey. Alright, so that’s what it’s not. What, what does it look like?

[00:27:59.80] spk_1:
It absolutely looks different for every organization. It absolutely looks different for every organization and that’s why it’s so critical to understand kind of where are we right now? Um where are we? As far as all of the components of our organization? Right. So volatile. Again, volunteers board staff culture. You said, you know, we were talking about people organization and leadership, which is obviously a lot of my work. Um, it is getting underneath all of those kinds of things to say. So who experiences our culture? How um so we do engagement surveys, Right. A lot of times we do engagement employee surveys, that kind of thing. Are we looking at those disagree in a disaggregated way? Are we asking different populations to identify themselves? And are we looking at what the experiences are by population? Are we asking explicit questions around whether or not you feel like you can be yourself in this organization, Whether you can provide dissenting opinions, whether you feel comfortable approaching your boss with feedback, um

[00:28:01.00] spk_0:
whether

[00:28:01.73] spk_1:
you feel comfortable volunteering for particular work, whether you feel like you understand what a promotion or performance management processes, whether you get the support that you need or to what extent you get support that you need either from colleagues, boss, leadership etcetera. So it’s looking at all of those things and then understanding are they being experienced differently by different communities within our organization?

[00:28:26.10] spk_0:
You mentioned disaggregate ng. That that’s where the data is not helpful, right?

[00:28:31.94] spk_1:
That is where we look at the data in terms of populations.

[00:28:35.58] spk_0:
Oh, of course. Aggregating. I’m sorry.

[00:28:39.09] spk_1:
Oh, that’s okay.

[00:28:40.34] spk_0:
You’re stuck with a lackluster host? No, of course, yes. Aggregating

[00:28:44.36] spk_1:
early in the week.

[00:29:00.70] spk_0:
Thank you. You couldn’t say early in the day, but thank you for being gracious. Okay. Yes. We we we want to disaggregate of course. Um and look by population and I guess cut a different way. I mean depending on the size of the organization, um age, race, uh

[00:29:25.54] spk_1:
race, ethnicity, um of physical ability, orientation. All of those need to be in the mix. Um gender as well. Including gender fluidity. So really looking at all of our populations and then understanding, you know, for these particular questions, is there a difference in how people experience our organization? We we know then what we do know is that if there is a difference that there is a difference, we don’t know that there is causality unless they’re unless you’ve asked questions that might begin to illuminate that. Right? But there’s there’s always that difference between correlation and causality and then what you want to do is get underneath that to understand why the experience might be different and why it might change along lines of gender or race or ethnicity or orientation or physical ability.

[00:29:57.07] spk_0:
We we we wandered, you know, but that’s that’s fine. I

[00:30:03.50] spk_1:
people

[00:30:09.82] spk_0:
culture and um and leadership all coming together. Um where where where do you want to go? Uh I mean, I would like to talk about people, culture and leadership. What’s a good, what’s a good next one?

[00:32:27.52] spk_1:
Yes. Well, so, so this is what you’re doing, right? As you’re you’re collecting information and all of those three areas. Right? And one so a couple of things that I would add to that is when you look at people, you’re looking at their experiences, when you look at the leadership, you’re looking at commitment, makeup, structure, access all of those kinds of things. When you’re looking at culture, you’re looking at how people experience the culture, Right? And so what, what is happening? What’s not happening? What’s stated out loud? What’s not stated out loud? What are the unwritten rules? There is also the piece that that forms all of these things, which is operational systems. Right? So things like performance management, things like um where people may sit back when we were in physical offices having access to technology, all of those kinds of things, particularly important now that we’re not in physical offices, so does everyone have access to the technology and information necessary to do their job, to do their jobs to do their work? So it is looking also at your operator side and saying, how do we live our operational life? How do how do people experience it, who do we engage with to provide services for our operations? How do we provide services if you will, for lack of better term to our employees? So it’s also looking at that because operations ultimately permeates organizational culture, people and leadership, Right? Because it kind of sustains all of that. So taking a look at that too. And finally, I would suggest again as part of this and as a wraparound is what is the internal external alignment? Right? So I often hear people say, hey, you know what, this is the subsector we work in, people would think that we’re really equitable, but internally we are living a different life than what we are putting out to our stakeholders and our constituencies externally. So what is what is our external life? And how does that need to inform our internal world? It’s not unusual for me to hear that the external life, the way we engage with stakeholders or the way we put out program Programmatic work is actually may be further along to the extent that this is considered to be a contain, it’s further along than the way that we’re living our life internally. So

[00:32:31.20] spk_0:
there’s dishonesty there disconnect that

[00:32:34.70] spk_1:
there’s a disconnect

[00:32:36.18] spk_0:
disconnect

[00:32:36.88] spk_1:
for sure and possibly yeah, dishonesty and hip hop maybe even hypocrisy.

[00:32:47.12] spk_0:
Yeah. Yeah. Alright. But again, all right. So that now we’re looking like this is organizational introspection. Exactly. There’s individual learning and introspection. Now we’re at the organizational level right? Being honest with our with our culture and our messaging.

[00:33:05.70] spk_1:
Right. Right. And and so what I try to do is to help organizations kind of look at those things and decide how we might evolve give in the future that we’ve set our sights on and given some of the principles that we’ve laid out. How do we kind of get there? How do we, how do we evolve our systems? How do we evolve our people practices? How do we evolve our culture. So hence the need to look at all of these things that centered around people, culture and leadership.

[00:35:27.37] spk_0:
It’s time for Tony’s take to debunk the top five myths of planned giving. I hate these insidious, pernicious myths like the one that planned giving will hurt your other fundraising and the one that you need a lawyer because plan giving is so complicated. I will debunk the top five myths in a webinar on Tuesday october 18th at 10 a.m. Pacific time, one p.m. Eastern time. but the time doesn’t matter because if you grab your spot for the webinar, you’ll get the video. This is 2022 you don’t need to be there. We’d love to have you live, but you don’t need to be there. I will be debunking these insidious myths in plain simple language and I’m gonna weave in my stand up comedy. The host is NP Solutions. They’re hosting, you are hosting me, they’re hosting us. That’s what hosts do they host their hosting? You go to N. P solutions dot org and click on workshops. What could be simpler. That is Tony’s take two. We’ve got the boo koo but loads more time for your dismantling racism journey with Gene Takagi. No, no, it’s with who writes this copy? I need an intern so badly, desperately. So I have somebody to blame. Please. You’re dismantling racism journey with pretty itchy Shah and intern resumes are welcome. What about the use of a professional facilitator? Because well, first of all, there’s a body of expertise that someone like you brings uh but also help with these difficult conversations. Talk about the value of having an expert facilitator. Yeah,

[00:36:50.97] spk_1:
absolutely. So, so, you know, I think I think there’s always a level of objectivity and and and kind of an in inside look by an outsider that you that you benefit from. We go to experts for everything from, you know, our health to the extent that we have access to those experts, which is a whole different conversation on race and oppression. Um, we we want that external voice. What I would say is it’s likely not going to be the same expert or the same facilitator and I say expert in quotes um, for everything. So for instance, I am not the voice to be centered on educating an organization around structural racism. I don’t think I’m the right voice to be centered. I would rather center voices like those at um, At race forward at equity in the center at those who have lived the results of 400 years of oppression. So you might want to call in someone for that discussion for that education. There are people that are better and more steeped in that and whose voices should absolutely be centered for that. Um, you might want to call in a voice for White Ally ship because there is some specifics around that that we need to talk about without kind of centering white voices. I’m

[00:36:51.22] spk_0:
sorry that white Ally ship. Yeah. What is that?

[00:38:01.95] spk_1:
So if we think about the or the organization, right, and are kind of culture and our people um, who who on staff sees themselves as an ally. And how can they be good? How can how can white people be good allies? Right. And how do how do we further and embed that in the culture. Um, and then finally, so keeping that in mind that there are gonna be different experts or different facilitators for different things, you know, who is going to be the person in my case, this actually might be me is to help us evolve our culture and our systems so that we can be more equitable and take a look at that, who’s gonna provide the training because there are skills necessary right to have these com conversations. There are foundational communication skills, there is the ability to give feedback. Um, there is the ability to communicate across cultures, across genders, across across groups. There is ability to be collaborative. So so also strengthening those skills while we continue to look at those things. But to think that all of this help is going to come from? One source is not ideal and unlikely it’s even inappropriate because everyone can’t be everything. I don’t try to be the voices that I can’t be, it’s inappropriate for me to do that.

[00:38:26.14] spk_0:
What what else do you wanna, what do you want to talk about? You know, given the level where that we’re at, we’re trying to help small and midsize nonprofits inaugurate a journey around racism and white privilege.

[00:39:44.81] spk_1:
Yeah, I think, I mean, look, first of all I hear a lot of organizations say like what what is the access point, like what do I get started doing? We put out a statement um in some cases we are experiencing some dissonance between the statement that we put out or the programmatic work that we do and the way that we’re living internally. So it is really understanding kind of why where are we now through all of the ways that that we’ve been talking about over the last several minutes. Where are we now? What is it that we’re not doing that we should be doing, What is it that we need to be doing? How do we define for us if we have an equitable culture, if we are living racial equity, what does that look like for us? Um how does that affect our programmatic work? How does that affect our operations? Everything from our finances to our people processes to when we are back in an office, even our physical setup. How how does that affect us and how would we define that future state? So it’s understanding what is my current state, what is my future state and then understanding how we get there and it’s likely gonna be along all of the areas that we said. Right? So individual journeys, some group and individual skill building, um some evolution of our systems and some understanding of kind of how we can support each other and support ourselves for those that are that affiliate with a particular group. Um and then kind of moving us along to that place of where we want to be. So it is it is understanding where you are that determines what your access point is. But I would say if you if you have done the work of putting out this statement then there then look for look for where you’re not living that statement internally.

[00:40:22.11] spk_0:
That sounds like a very good place to Yeah, to start your search for for an access point because it’s so recent, your organization has probably said something in the past 56 weeks.

[00:40:23.77] spk_1:
Absolutely

[00:40:26.78] spk_0:
to that, to that statement.

[00:40:43.46] spk_1:
Exactly. And and we are incredibly, I would say and pardon the use of the term, but almost fortunate that so many thought leaders have been kind and generous enough to share with us their thoughts on this moment, so not just within the sector, but all the way across our society. So many people have taken the time and the patients and the generosity amidst everything else that they’re living through, they have agreed to share their thoughts, their leadership, their expertise with us. So there is a ton of knowledge out there right at our fingertips and that’s a that’s another really great place to start and to center the voices that most need to be heard

[00:41:15.89] spk_0:
at the same time. You know, we are seeing beginnings of change uh institutions from Princeton University to the state of Mississippi

[00:41:37.59] spk_1:
right? Absolutely. To hopefully, you know, the unnamed Washington football team and to Nascar and places where we, I didn’t know that change necessarily was possible, but we we are same change and and the important thing is is to not be complacent about that change,

[00:42:41.88] spk_0:
right and not and also recognize that it’s just a beginning. You know, removing confederate statues, um taking old glory off the Mississippi flag. These are just beginnings. But I think worth worth noting. I mean worth recognizing and celebrating because The state of Mississippi is a big institution and it’s been wrestling with this for, I don’t know if they’ve been wrestling for centuries, but that flag has been there for that just that long 18. Some things I think is when that flag was developed. So it’s been a long, it’s been a long time coming. So recognizing it for what it is and celebrating it, you know, to the extent that yeah, to the extent that represents the change, the beginning of the beginning of change. All right. Um well, you know, what else, what else, what else do you want to share with folks at this? You know, at this stage?

[00:43:50.39] spk_1:
You know, I think, I think the main thing is um dig in, We need to dig in on this. We need to dig in on this because in the same way that that we have been living this society societally for so long. Our organizations many times are microcosms of society. So if we think as an organization that were exempt or that were already there, we’ve arrived at like a post racial culture, that’s not the case, that’s just not the case. Um, so where do you want to dig in? Where do you want to dig in, chances are good you are doing some version of looking at issues within your organization, whether it’s your annual survey, if you do it annually or whatever in which you can use that information to begin this journey. So dig in from where you are. It’s one of those things that if you’re waiting, if you’re waiting for kind of the exact right time or further analysis to begin the journey again, it’s not it’s not based solely on analysis. There is a p there is certainly information. There’s data that needs to be understood. But if we’re waiting for endless analysis to happen or to kind of point us to the right time, that’s not going to happen. The intellectualism needs to be there. But again, as we said in the path, as we’ve said a few times during the course of our conversation, this is about emotional resonance and an emotional ownership and a moral obligation. So, dig in, dig in wherever you are right now,

[00:44:38.44] spk_0:
what if I’m trying within my organization and I’m not the leader, I’m not even second or third tier management or something, You know, how do I elevate the conversation? I presume it helps to have allies. What if what if I’m meeting a resistance from the people who, who are in leadership?

[00:45:11.35] spk_1:
I think look for the places where there may not be resistance, right? So look within the organization. Um, if there is resistance at a particular level, then you know, who do you have access to in the organization where there isn’t that? And I think, I think starting out not assuming that you have solutions if you have expertise in this area, if you have lived through the oppression as a member of a community that has lived through the impression, particularly in the black community, I think you’re coming from one place if you are, if you are not in that community and saying that you have expertise, I think you have to be a little bit more circumspect about that and introspective about what you can offer in this vein. Um, and I think, I think we want to look for the places where there is some traction, I think in most organizations, it’s not unusual to be getting the question right now,

[00:45:47.45] spk_0:
and what is the, I don’t want to call it outcome. What, what, what what can the future look like for our organization if we do embark on this long journey,

[00:46:18.02] spk_1:
uh, cultures that are equitable in which people can show up as their whole selves, um, in which there is not only one right way to do things which tends to be a very kind of white dominant Western culture, linear sequential way of, of managing work of managing communications, etcetera, but that in fact work can be approached in a number of different ways and that solutions can be approached in a number of different ways. People get to show up and give their all to these missions that we all hold very near and dear. And so they are able they’re empowered. They are able they are celebrated without sticking to a set of preconceived guidelines or preconceived unwritten or written rules that don’t serve us anymore. Anyway,

[00:46:44.78] spk_0:
when you started to answer that, I saw your face lighten up your I don’t know, it was a smile, it just looks like your face untended. Not that you’re nervous,

[00:46:55.65] spk_1:
Your face changed,

[00:47:06.37] spk_0:
started to answer the where we could be. Uh yeah, it was, it was palpable. Alright, alright. Are you comfortable leaving it there?

[00:47:09.88] spk_1:
I think so. I think so what have we not covered that? We need to cover for your listeners,

[00:47:15.60] spk_0:
you know that better than I getting started. That’s

[00:47:34.18] spk_1:
fair. Look, you know what, this is, this is the future that is written with many voices and and while I think I can be helpful, I don’t presume to be the voice that has all the answers. I definitively don’t. I definitively don’t. And so what we have not covered is actually probably not known to me, but I dare say someone, someone out there does know that and and they will likely be putting their voice up, which is exactly what we want.

[00:47:47.19] spk_0:
Yes, we will be bringing other voices as well. Alright,

[00:47:50.25] spk_1:
no doubt. Yeah,

[00:48:02.94] spk_0:
she’s founder and Ceo of flourished Talent management Solutions and the company is at flourish tMS dot com. Thank you so much. Thank you very very much.

[00:48:05.97] spk_1:
Thank you. Thank you for opening up this space and having the conversation

[00:49:10.60] spk_0:
a pleasure. Uh it’s a responsibility and happy to live up to it. Try trying next week Beth Canter and Alison fine on their new book the smart non profit if you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com were sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o and by fourth dimension technologies their I. T. Infra in a box. The affordable tech solution for nonprofits. tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant four D. Just like three D. But they go one dimension deeper. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff shows, social media is by Susan Chavez. Marc Silverman is our web guy and this music is by scott Stein, Thank you for that. Affirmation Scotty B with me next week for nonprofit radio big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great

Nonprofit Radio for August 22, 2022: Accounting For Nonprofit Leaders

 

Tosha Anderson & Zanni Miranda: Accounting For Nonprofit Leaders

In our penultimate #22NTC show, Tosha Anderson and Zanni Miranda introduce key accounting concepts to help nonprofit leadership avoid the common pitfalls they see. Tosha is CEO of The Charity CFO and Zanni is with Nonprofit Solutions.

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[00:01:51.40] spk_0:
Hello and welcome to Tony-Martignetti non profit radio big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer the effects of pseudo papillae Dema if I saw that you missed this week’s show Accounting for nonprofit leaders in our penultimate 22. NTC show Tasha Anderson and Zanny Miranda introduce key accounting concepts to help nonprofit leadership avoid the common pitfalls. They see Tasha is ceo of the charity CFO and Zanny is with nonprofit solutions on tony take to the endowment excitement webinar, we’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c. O. And by fourth dimension technologies I. Tion for in a box. The affordable tech solution for nonprofits. tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant D just like three d but they go on to mention deeper here is accounting for nonprofit leaders. Welcome to nonprofit radio coverage of 22 N. T. C. The 2022 nonprofit technology conference. My guests now are Tasha Anderson and Zanny Miranda. Tasha is founder and ceo of the charity cf. Oh Zanny Miranda is operations Manager at nonprofit solutions. Tasha Zani. Welcome to nonprofit radio Thank

[00:02:05.94] spk_1:
you for having us. Yeah,

[00:02:07.50] spk_2:
thank you so much for having us on

[00:02:11.89] spk_0:
pleasure. I’m glad we’re gonna talk about this. But 10 things every nonprofit leader should know about their accounting

[00:02:17.66] spk_1:
Alright.

[00:02:23.44] spk_0:
I I suspect this is an often ignored um ignored area by by nonprofit leaders until there’s some kind of a problem I guess or until the the 9 90 has to be filed, you know, so maybe once a year they become, or maybe there’s board reports, but in between all that, um I suspect it’s ignored. Uh Tasha, do I have that? You’re nodding? Is that

[00:03:12.03] spk_1:
yeah, I think, yeah, I think it’s ignored because it’s for a lot of small organizations. It’s not their primary role. It’s not what they’re experienced in. It’s not their skill set and it becomes one of those things, it’s not an immediate issue. It’s not something I’m particularly good at, it’s something I’m gonna have to teach myself and I’m gonna have to um very kind of the procrastination that I put into it. And then it’s when things kind of abrupt Show up like our 9 90 return or we realized we have an audit or our books have gotten further and further behind and now we have to hurry up and scramble for that, you know, board meeting or something to that effect. Um that’s kind of best case scenario. Um worst case scenarios are other more significant things that might come up with our accounting. Um that that all of a sudden becomes more of a priority.

[00:03:34.21] spk_0:
Like, alright, we’re focused on motivation. What are what are one or two of those worst case scenarios?

[00:04:46.20] spk_1:
Well, some of those worst case scenarios, I think more abruptly we get a lot of clients that work with us that have a lot of government funding and government funding usually includes um some pop up surprise what they call site visits. So if you anticipate uh your site visit or kind of your audit, I use the word loosely with audit. But if you expect your funder to show up on, you know, this period and then they end up coming in sooner or more regularly, either normal or whatever. They just changed their protocol and you’re not prepared for that. That then calls into question your ability to manage the program, your ability to manage the finances of that particular program. And we’ve seen organizations be at risk for losing their funding. And we’ve seen that more often than not, which we’ve kind of talked about and the original presentation that Danny and I did some of the challenges around um not just, you know, keeping caught up with the accounting, but the succession planning um in the transition. I mean, we’re in the midst of what they call the great recession. And so what organizations do that put all of their eggs in one basket with respect to this kind of swiss be nice if you will position that holds also financial management. And when those positions turn over, we’ve seen organizations find themselves really vulnerable situations and it becomes very apparent when it’s time to start sending those periodic reports to your funders or when they start to come out, when you look at your records, it’s a problem.

[00:05:06.79] spk_0:
You’re referring to the great resignation. You mean succession planning. Okay.

[00:05:16.60] spk_1:
I’m

[00:05:35.54] spk_0:
listening. I’m listening channel. I’m channeling listeners. They’re gonna say, wait, great recession. That was many years. Alright. We know we know what you meant. Alright. So Zanny, why don’t you why don’t you kick us off? We got 10 things people are supposed to know nonprofit leaders are supposed to know. So let me ask you before we kick off with our our list. Is this specifically the C the C. E. O. Are we, are we at that level? You know, listeners here are small and midsize nonprofits. So that could be like one or two people up to. I mean 100 or 250 employees could be a midsize nonprofit. Are we in the meat with this? We’re talking about nonprofit leaders. I assume we are.

[00:05:57.71] spk_1:
I

[00:05:57.89] spk_2:
actually think that this information can be for any leader that is self designated or you know, does hold one of those executive positions. I think what we share in this presentation is really about making sure everyone is on the same page across the entire organization. So it’s really for anyone,

[00:06:28.03] spk_0:
uh, with, uh, okay. But we don’t want our Ceo and other other C suite executives ignoring these things. Certainly.

[00:06:30.92] spk_2:
No. Okay.

[00:06:32.33] spk_0:
Okay. All right. So why don’t you kick us off? What’s uh, what’s your

[00:06:37.25] spk_2:
first one is definitely benchmarks and metrics and making sure that you have defined expectations about what those are and how they fit with your organization and I’ll actually pass this one over to Tasha because this is definitely her area of expertise as the C. P. A expert.

[00:07:54.23] spk_1:
Yeah, sure. Uh, so really what we mean by defining benchmarks? Oftentimes, what we see is that not just the tactical work of bookkeeping and accounting is delegated to one individual, but almost the full financial management and responsibility. Understanding how much money is in the bank account. Are we receiving the funding that we thought we were, Are we utilizing the contracts that we’ve committed to our to our funders? Really high level, even where we are with our fundraising goals. And I’ve personally been someone that kind of delegated that responsibility and financial oversight. And I just think it’s imperative whether you’re a for profit business and non profit business at the end of the day, it’s a tax designation. It’s not just because you’re a nonprofit, you should not be delegating full financial ownership and responsibility of your organization to one single person. This is really where that leadership at the ceo level or executive director level, there needs to be some understanding of what your benchmarks are. What are you trying to measure in the holding people accountable to it? And I’ve seen so often where the accountant or the bookkeeper is delegated the responsibility of the budget and they might be doing the bookkeeping in the reconciliations and all that. But is anybody really looking at that budget and holding anybody accountable to it? So what we’re really encouraging is that the leader, you need to understand where things are and what expectations do you have? What processes do you have in place to make sure that you’re moving in the right direction? So

[00:08:19.70] spk_0:
following the budget doesn’t belong with the bookkeeper.

[00:08:23.50] spk_1:
The

[00:08:23.97] spk_0:
bookkeeper does the work.

[00:08:49.29] spk_1:
Yes, the bookkeeper prepares the reports, diving into Why is this off from what we expected? That is joint ownership, frankly, in my opinion, from from the individuals that are charged with that. So your program team, maybe your fundraising team. And I recognize we’re talking with small to middle size at a minimum. The Ceo is looking at this or the executive director and so often times I see uh leadership teams that are just delegating that responsibility and they’re not really immersing themselves in the financial management, the way that I think they should

[00:09:00.00] spk_0:
be alright. You didn’t have to, you know, you two don’t have to go in sequence. You could have picked one that you’re, that you’re an expert on. You know, you don’t have to do it the same sequence. You did it in your in your in your seminar. Alright.

[00:09:13.07] spk_2:
Well, I definitely wanted to make sure Tasha kind of came from the C P a standpoint,

[00:09:18.39] spk_0:
you know, make

[00:09:21.36] spk_2:
sure they all knew, Yeah,

[00:09:22.75] spk_0:
she’s the charity. CFO so

[00:09:24.30] spk_2:
she knows what she’s talking

[00:09:26.01] spk_0:
about

[00:10:08.64] spk_2:
and I have to say I come from the small nonprofit side. So we have a mighty team of three full time and one part time person. So we are, you know, definitely representative of some of the groups that are probably listening. So and these are all things, these are all things that we have learned through working with Tasha that um are very important and we went through a transition and planning and uh had a transition in leadership which then created a transition into changing our bookkeeper um to the charity CFO. So we went through a lot of what we’re talking about in terms of the the sort of scarier situations of how did we get ourselves in this situation? What does this all mean? Where all the, you know, how do we get everybody on the same page? So we definitely learned our lessons.

[00:10:21.81] spk_0:
Let pick one that you are familiar with that you can talk about what’s next.

[00:11:23.37] spk_2:
Yeah, let me take a look. So I know that so kind of speaking about like getting into a sticky situation or number four is I would have understand my compliance needs. And I think that when you do like Tasha was saying, when you have those government funders or even really complicated funding grants from foundations, sometimes they require progress reports, they require year end um reports that can be really calm complicated to do at the last minute and they can be really complicated if you have not set yourself up for success at the very beginning. And so one of the things that we sort of have said is that you really need to take a look at what the grant is requesting from you when they’re, when you’re in that grant search process. And before you apply or maybe right after you apply, making sure that you’ve got things set up with your accountant and things set up in your chart of accounts to make sure that when you’re going through and processing and actually spending money related to these grants, you’ve got everything in place, you know, from the onset, so that it makes it a lot easier to pull those reports and to get that information instead of scrambling and going through, you know, a year’s worth of credit card receipts.

[00:11:50.57] spk_0:
Yeah.

[00:11:53.20] spk_2:
Mentioned

[00:12:17.33] spk_0:
compliance. And there’s, there’s state state laws also depending on what state you’re in. You know, there are, there are the laws that you have to be registered in each state where you solicit donations, that whole charity registration morass that I used to have as part of my practice. Um, you know, keeping keeping track of that. Um, there, there could be, uh, other, I mean, there are federal, there are federal rules that have to stay in compliance with, so there’s, there’s a lot, there’s a lot in that word, compliance.

[00:12:35.20] spk_2:
Yeah, exactly. It’s not just the funding that you get, it’s making sure that, you know, the things that you’re doing are following the law all year, not just when someone comes knocking

[00:12:43.02] spk_0:
and and Tasha, these often come up in audits right? They’ll be they’ll be uh I forget with the technical terms, but they’ll be like memo items in uh report items in an audit that you know, you’re not in compliance with something here. Things like

[00:14:10.94] spk_1:
that. Yeah, findings. And what’s really interesting. I have a funny story when so I used to be a CFO of a non profit organization and we had 14 different government contracts that were a little larger probably than maybe an average listener. We’re about, you know, 6 to 8 million a year. And uh that’s that’s that’s to me that seems large because so many organizations are much smaller than that. But really that’s not huge and what’s really, we went through every single one of our program contracts and wrote down all of the things we’re responsible reporting out to them. So not just on the financial compliance side but also like program outcomes and those sort of things. Anyway, we had five pages front and back on an Excel spreadsheet when we printed it out was five pages, front and back of all of the things that we were responsible for reporting out to someone. And so the more more complex your funding gets, whether it’s multiple foundations or government funding sources. When we hear the word audit. I think we think at the end of the year we have a C. P. A firm that comes in and does an audit. But oftentimes what people don’t realize that you may have multiple audits or inspections or reviews or whatever word you want to use for the same funding, right? You might get um, you know, kind of beat up at a local level through some pass through fun. Then you might have that sourced through the feds and then the feds might come in and do an audit, right? And then your auditors that come in at the end of the year that you hire will also do an audit. So I think that sometimes I’ve seen our clients not necessarily read the fine print of those grant agreements to know what they’re going to be responsible for doing and what frequency. So they find themselves kind of working reactively and scrambling to get that stuff.

[00:15:57.46] spk_0:
It’s time for a break. Turn to communications media relationships and thought leadership. You need one to get the other. You got to have the media relationships. So you get exposure and become the thought leader. Turn to will help you build those relationships. They’re former journalists themselves. And by the way, as you’re getting that exposure, they’ll help you craft your messaging. You get the increased exposure. You’re seen as a thought leader in your field. The thought Leader, the thought leader in your field, they can make it happen. Turn to communications, your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o. Now back to accounting for nonprofit leaders. You wanna know as any said, you want to know ahead of time what the requirements are. First to make sure that you can comply with them. You have the infrastructure either internally or or through a provider to do it, you know, and if it’s if it’s beyond you, then that that’s not a grant that you should be applying for because you can’t keep up with the I mean the money may look nice, but you can’t keep up with the back end requirements and you’re gonna end up in a bad situation. Okay.

[00:15:58.93] spk_1:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:16:00.26] spk_2:
Absolutely. No.

[00:16:01.56] spk_0:
In advance. I’m sure this especially applies to a government, a government agency. Yeah.

[00:16:07.28] spk_1:
And that’s funny. We we talked about that a little bit in our session just because there’s money available may not be a good deal. Just what you’re doing, not just the infrastructure. Um, there’s a lot of considerations where it might make sense for an organization to not accept funding. Um, it just doesn’t make sense. And asking ourselves those hard questions before we just

[00:16:25.90] spk_0:
before, Yeah. Look, look closely at what your obligations, your responsibilities are gonna be. All right. All right, well, let’s stay with you, Tasha. Why don’t you give us another another thing. Leadership should know about.

[00:17:33.03] spk_1:
Alright. I think another thing that leaders don’t always realize again, because most leaders of nonprofit organizations, they don’t come from the financial business management side of the biz right? Oftentimes you’ll see leaders that maybe come from the programmatic side of things. Um, and that’s fantastic for a lot of reasons. But what I think some people default to hearing, well this just can’t be done or this financial report can’t be created in the way that you want. And I really encourage leaders of organizations again, to define those expectations of what they’re looking for and ask their account to develop tools that help them measure if we’re on track or not. And this is usually by way of financial reports. And I hear this all the time. Tasha, you know, I get the standard set of financial reports from my accountants. It doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to my board. We don’t know where we’re at, we don’t know which direction we’re heading and what I tell people all the time that financial reports, Yes, your auditors will require to look in this perfect box and it has to look exactly like that. But that’s for the outside world. Think about what your organization needs internally and create those measurements, those tools, those financial reports. That makes sense for you internally. So that you can make business decisions based upon that and what a lot of people don’t realize.

[00:17:52.75] spk_2:
We

[00:18:53.12] spk_1:
Have over 150 clients. Probably many, if not all of them have some level of customization to their reports. So they need to get reports that make sense to them, not already nonprofits have to have the same internal financial statements. In fact, you shouldn’t have the same internal financial statements and start asking yourself what do you need to see? So I’ll give you an example. I have one organization that was really, really cash strapped. They had all the revenue sources in place. They could not understand why are we cash poor, Why do we not have any money? And the reality. After a quick look at some of the financial reports, I realized they were building their funders but they were never collecting them. There were some issues with the quality of their invoicing and some problems they weren’t troubleshooting and poor training and just some other issues that are actually pretty easily fixed. But going forward once we were able to get caught up on that building, the ceo want to make sure that never happened again. So she wanted to make sure she got a detailed listing of what invoices were still outstanding because she started understanding the, the, the timing of when payments were expected to come in and once things started to go off track

[00:18:59.15] spk_0:
basically

[00:18:59.70] spk_1:
immediately, basically

[00:19:01.09] spk_0:
talking about tracking your accounts payable.

[00:19:02.88] spk_1:
Yeah, accounts receivable in this case or payable

[00:19:14.25] spk_0:
receivable? Your receivables? Yeah. I took, I took accounting for poets in college. So I do remember that, um, assets equal liabilities plus owner equity. Is that still true?

[00:19:19.74] spk_1:
That is true.

[00:19:20.97] spk_0:
Axiom still still valid. Like a law of physics doesn’t change. Okay.

[00:19:25.52] spk_1:
In the nonprofit world, we say we don’t have equity because there’s no ownership. But the concept is still the same. We called net assets in the nonprofit world, but the concept is still the same

[00:19:34.74] spk_0:
assets equals net assets. Oh no, we

[00:19:37.60] spk_1:
called the net assets. Yeah.

[00:19:39.61] spk_0:
But the other side is assets, assets equals net assets.

[00:19:43.54] spk_1:
You could do assets minus liabilities equal net assets or assets, you know, equal, you know, however you want to do the algebra of the formula, you could say in multiple different ways. But um, yeah, we say assets minus liabilities equals net assets, but

[00:19:58.75] spk_0:
assets, my stuff, that makes sense to me, assets. Everything you have minus what you owe your liabilities, which I know, I know I’m grossly oversimplifying by when I said what? You know, but again, I took accounting for poets. So you’ll have to excuse that. I’m trainable. I guess I wasn’t, uh, yeah, equals your net assets. Right. Everything you have minus what you owe is is the net

[00:20:21.20] spk_1:
okay.

[00:20:22.47] spk_0:
We don’t have to go any deeper than that. We shouldn’t.

[00:20:24.85] spk_1:
No one wants to hear that. But

[00:20:26.63] spk_0:
Not profit leaders should not profit leaders should, I’m not a nonprofit leader. So I’m not, I’m not on the hook for this. Alright. Um, name another one. Somebody. Somebody throw out another another top 10.

[00:21:32.17] spk_2:
Well, I think, um, following up to sort of, what Tasha was already saying is that you can have all those in place, but if you don’t have anyone, um, doing checks and balances or even around to take over key processes. If someone goes or if someone’s out on vacation, that’s a really major risk. You know, we were in the training or the workshop last week and a lot of people really resonated with this, you know, don’t burn out the one person you have on your team who knows how to do payroll? Who knows how to do vendor payments? Who knows how to do the bank deposits. There can’t be just one person on your team who knows how to do all these things. There needs to be some, you know, some thought to succession planning. Some thought too. Um,

[00:21:32.59] spk_0:
or not even not even succession planning, just like you said vacation.

[00:21:36.04] spk_2:
Yeah, just process documentation.

[00:21:38.00] spk_0:
You know, we got somebody goes out on maternity leave. We still have to process, we still have to process vendor purchase orders.

[00:21:52.11] spk_2:
Yeah, we had someone chat in the comments saying I’m going out on maternity leave, but I still have to process payroll, which is not

[00:21:53.91] spk_0:
great.

[00:22:14.59] spk_2:
That’s not great for your staff’s morale. So definitely just making sure you’ve got some of those basic processes written down, trained, um, cross trained with different people and having backups in place so that people can take a break and people can, you know, not have that looming over their head when they’re supposed to be on maternity leave

[00:22:20.03] spk_0:
or, or

[00:22:21.18] spk_2:
family leave, you know, it’s not sustainable.

[00:22:37.49] spk_0:
Um, I have seen that too, in, in uh, clients that I’ve worked with. I do plan giving fundraising. Um, and you know, we have, we need vendor, we have vendors, there might be, there’s, uh, you know, there’s a company that that manages the soft that provides the software for playing giving calculations. Well that purchase order has to be paid. You know, my purchase order has to be

[00:22:49.87] spk_2:
paid. It

[00:22:51.37] spk_0:
seems sometimes to be one person who can do it and we’re all, we’re all screwed if that person is busy or away or whatever. Alright, let’s stick with you. Give us another one.

[00:23:26.25] spk_2:
Sure. Another thing that you brought up was having the right software to use. So, um, you know, we found when we were in our sort of leadership transition in our, uh, you know, transition between bookkeepers. We just had someone who was, you know, taking our information and then,

[00:23:27.07] spk_0:
you know,

[00:23:27.81] spk_2:
kind of piecemeal putting it together, like looking at the paper receipts, looking at this and really it’s just not sustainable long term to do that. And there are so many options with technology

[00:23:38.44] spk_0:
now to

[00:23:39.84] spk_2:
really make the transition easier. And a lot of nonprofits do qualify for

[00:23:46.85] spk_0:
discounts

[00:24:08.43] spk_2:
for some of these larger tech companies, they have a lot of for profit people using their services. So they, most of the time will have a nonprofit discount or even offer their their software for free. And really it just becomes a matter of making sure that the people in your organization are up to speed. And um, I think Tasha had an incredible case study that she shared about what, how she saw this kind of go sideways um, in her own practice. Okay,

[00:24:35.66] spk_0:
Natasha before you tell that story, aren’t there? There’s also scores of smaller companies that are devoted to nonprofit financial management we through the years. And non profit radio I’ve had one or maybe two of them as sponsors. You know, there they’ll say that, you know, quickbooks is basically they’re they’re, they’re thinking is Quickbooks is not made for non profits. You have to be able to do fund accounting and things and you know, so we’ve got, we’ve got the software solution that’s an accounting financial management devoted to non profits. You don’t have to modify Quickbooks or Intuit or something. Or maybe intuit’s Quickbooks, I don’t even know.

[00:24:58.47] spk_2:
But

[00:25:03.05] spk_0:
counting for poets, but you know, um, so you don’t have to use these major companies that there’s smaller, smaller apps devoted to nonprofit financial management. Right?

[00:26:34.72] spk_1:
That’s right. That’s right. And it’s funny, I was gonna talk a little bit about that because I think that there are a lot of organization accountants that will say nonprofit accounting is super special and we have to have everything special. Um, and I, I don’t disagree with that completely. But the challenge is it creates a, it creates barriers for nonprofit organizations to be able to um work with some of these providers, especially if the proprietor like proprietary software or things of this nature, What I try to do with our clients is create software solutions that can work with nonprofits have a really low cost point price point on those things. And more importantly, the software is very user friendly. There’s a lot of free training resources. So we actually use Quickbooks. I’m not being paid to say that I have no formal partnership with Quickbooks, but I like the software because if they needed to bring their accounting back in house when working with us, they could find bookkeepers or accountants that have experience with with Quickbooks. And so sometimes I think it’s a matter of preference. I say as an account that has my own preferences for how I like to do things. I think it’s, I can say that, but what I think is um important for nonprofits to understand what technology is available out there to Sandy’s point and how can they use that to alleviate some of the manual um time consuming task going back to not burning out your one person that does everything. If you can find ways to autumn streamline that they can maybe focus on bigger value added work or just simply take a breather or focus on work that feeds their soul a little bit more than just doing data entry into the accounting. So

[00:26:50.44] spk_0:
Okay, Zanny said you have a story well

[00:26:51.15] spk_1:
in this particular case. Sure. Yeah, sure. So

[00:26:54.90] spk_0:
speaking

[00:26:55.97] spk_1:
of tedious work that burns people out and it’s very time consuming. So I started working with an organization way way back many, many years ago and

[00:27:04.76] spk_0:
they, this is not, this is not a story about.

[00:27:07.30] spk_2:
No not

[00:27:12.05] spk_0:
but it’s not okay.

[00:27:14.12] spk_1:
No I have a friend. No it’s

[00:27:15.73] spk_0:
not. Yeah

[00:29:06.76] spk_1:
exactly. No it’s about software and how software can change how we do things. So I started working with an organization which actually is now a client of ours um in a very contract away a few years ago and we realized that they were heavy credit card users, credit cards are debating the existence of all accountants out there for every nonprofit. I promised you can quote me on that. I’m sure. Uh And the problem is that there’s not a good system for collecting the receipts, it’s very manual. Um You have got a copy, you gotta scan, you got a code, you got to get into all the people. Anyway, they have about 20 credit cards that have hundreds if not thousands of transactions a month. The accountant, the finance director um is they hired that person for that high level skill analysis, Financial thought leadership. That person was spending a good week of her month. So 25% of her working days, reconciling and tracking down all of these hundreds of receipt if not thousands depending on the time of the year. And one of the things that we immediately realized this person actually left the organization and the organization was left scrambling trying to replace it. And one of the things we realized immediately, we could save a lot of time. If we just have software, your team is already making copies of the recedes, forwarding it to the account, the account has to use all these Softwares to stamp it with electronic approvals and all that. We could replace that whole manual back and forth email flurry of system with the software, like many of nonprofits out there now use things like expensive fi or dext or or something like this where the user of the credit card actually just takes an image identifies what type of expense it is if it’s designated to a specific funder, um, if it’s restricted or not and then submits it off to the accountant and the accountant just matches them up with what’s actually ending the bank account. So this whole flurry of hundreds and hundreds of unnecessary emails, all of this monotonous detailed work that you’re bogging your accountant down with. Um, now has freed up their time to be able to do other things. In this case, it actually saved them cost because we don’t have to do that much work and it’s not as labor intensive, but if you did have somebody in house that you wanted them to focus on higher value work that that’s more valuable to the organization. You can use technology to do that sort of thing. So I’ll echo what Danny had said.

[00:30:27.33] spk_0:
It’s time for a break. Fourth dimension technologies. The free offer. It’s still out there exclusively for nonprofit radio listeners, complimentary 24 7 monitoring of your I. T. Assets for three months. They’ll monitor your servers, network and cloud performance, they’ll monitor your backup performance all 24 7. If there are any issues, they’ll let you know ASAP and you will get a comprehensive report on how you’re doing at the end of the three month monitoring. And they’re gonna throw in a few surprise offers as well. It’s complimentary, it’s on the listener landing page, tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant mention deeper. Let’s return to accounting for nonprofit leaders. Tasha, name those couple of resources that folks could look at again.

[00:31:03.46] spk_1:
So again, I like kind of uh out of the box like package is really easy to use expensive. Fi is a really popular one. Um dext formerly known as receipt bank is one. So those are two that work really well with Quickbooks are very user friendly. Um, you can have your people that use credit cards a lot of times they’ll have like apps on their smartphones and so they just take a picture of it while they’re out spending, you know, the money rather than worrying about lost receipts and things like that. So those are two really common ones that are again, really low price point and easy to implement. Easy to use

[00:31:09.49] spk_0:
is dexter D. E. X.

[00:31:11.25] spk_1:
T. That’s right, yep.

[00:31:12.88] spk_0:
Okay. And expense if I. Okay. Yeah. Alright let’s stay with you. Tasha give us another, we’re halfway through our list by the way I’ve been keeping track,

[00:31:22.99] spk_1:
we’re not combining any of these.

[00:31:24.99] spk_0:
Alright if we end up as long as

[00:31:26.49] spk_1:
well we’ll tell you when we run out,

[00:31:29.94] spk_0:
as long as we cover the content. You know it doesn’t we end up doing them uh 10 things but we ate you know ate under eight topics as long as as long as you’re not holding back on non profit radio listeners that

[00:31:39.14] spk_1:
we’re not holding.

[00:31:40.16] spk_0:
That’s my concern. That’s my audit. That is my benchmark. Is that the content is there doesn’t have to be under 10 distinct rubrics. But we have done five anyway. Alright.

[00:34:04.12] spk_1:
Okay so the next one I would say uh that uh nonprofits don’t necessarily realize that there’s not a one size fits all with accountants. And I think I realized this when I started hiring my own accountants and staffing um the work as the charity CFO for on behalf of our other clients. And what do I mean by this like any profession accountants and their experiences, skills and expertise vary. So I kind of divide up in this 80 20. Roll the infamous 80 20 rule 80% of accounting is very transactional input output. You need somebody that’s very good at attention to detail, very consistent, very reliable thrives and routine. They like doing the same things over and over again. There are a lot of accountants out there like that. Um They do a great job Then there’s like the 20% of accounting, that’s the creative accounting but not you know, go to jail creative accounting. I’m talking moving the needle with the organization, building better budgets, building financial models, really thinking how we can implement best practices or re imagining what our accounting function can look like implementing software. For example these are the visionaries. If you will, you can probably guess which one of those I am. I find that most organizations, all organizations need both of those skill sets, the challenge is oftentimes, although the label on the title on the resume or the job is accountant or CFO or controller or whatever, but the reality is there’s two different types of accountants. Now, some people could try to do both but that’s not where their skill set is. So if you took someone like me a 20% and you put me in a job where 80% of my time is doing, you know, detailed work on routine tasks. I’m not gonna stick around for a long time, I want to do things that feed my soul and on the flip side if you take a more transactional tactical accountant, that’s really good and you expect them to solve all of your financial world problems, you’re probably not going to get as far as you would hope. And I think that many organizations think that they could hire an accountant to do all of those things and and I think that that’s not realistic and that’s why we see some turnover in these roles um or organizations struggle with, I just need somebody that does both of these things. And I don’t think people really realize that accountants are not all the same. And so many organizations, money is not such an abundance that we can just both of those accountants.

[00:34:13.35] spk_0:
So

[00:35:27.46] spk_1:
a lot of nonprofits have to decide what’s most important. How can I get both of those um Accounting needs met tactical detail because that’s 80% of the work, you know keep the wheels turning and the bills paid. Um and but how can I also get that financial thought leadership that I’m looking for. So what I’ve seen in some cases that organizations will maybe higher and operate person, I just did a podcast the other day saying like nonprofits are quitting their accountant and what I meant by that is non profits are moving um similar to Danny actually probably speak better to this than I organizations are moving to more of an operations person that’s kind of the hub and spoke and they’re outsourcing outsourcing some of that technical work right? Maybe it’s hr maybe it’s accounting, maybe it’s I. T. But you still have somebody that can maybe do some of the tactical work because they’re on the front lines. They’re interacting with the staff in a more significant way. Or maybe they’re outsourcing that financial thought leadership. Or maybe they have a financial thought leadership in house but they’re using some other staff people to help do some of the bookkeeping. So that again you keep people doing what they do best um and creating work that’s meaningful for them. So not all accounts are created the same.

[00:35:31.32] spk_0:
Not all made the same

[00:35:32.19] spk_1:
as the biggest takeaway.

[00:35:33.35] spk_0:
Alright. Um I have to ask though, are there any accountants who would say I’m in the 80%?

[00:35:39.97] spk_1:
Absolutely.

[00:35:41.15] spk_0:
I’ve got a whole team.

[00:35:42.20] spk_1:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny because I have 32 employees and I would say probably 70% of my staff falls into that and we need to make sure that people see a path that they can take on additional responsibilities but not so much that they’re gonna be overwhelmed. Um

[00:35:59.67] spk_0:
I thought maybe all accountants think they’re in the creative,

[00:36:03.16] spk_1:
definitely not.

[00:36:06.28] spk_0:
Not that they actually are but that they think they are. It’s it’s a self image question.

[00:36:10.31] spk_1:
Well that’s a great point. I sometimes think as accountants are known to have maybe inflated egos of herself. If I dare to

[00:36:20.20] spk_0:
say. All right. That’s that’s where it was coming. That’s where I was coming

[00:36:22.06] spk_1:
from not

[00:36:23.07] spk_0:
where they are but where they think they are. All right, well, we’ll uh we’ll concede that you’re definitely in the 20% because you you can’t run a company called the charity CFO if if you’re if you’re not be the otherwise you’d be the charity bookkeeper,

[00:36:37.98] spk_2:
you’re

[00:36:39.11] spk_0:
not the charity bookkeeper. Alright. Um Danny, you want to contribute something.

[00:38:53.16] spk_2:
Yeah. So, you know, as Tasha was talking and and sort of talking about how, you know, technology needs. Like everyone can just use decks to take a picture and know what account to send it to and have everything all easy peasy kind of ready to go and like technology takes care of it, blah blah blah. Well, you can really get yourself into trouble if you don’t actually know what the structure of your accounting system is. So let’s say you have a program person who is using dext or even just you know, trying to code something on their receipt to share with their accountant. But they put the wrong chart of accounts. Well, the accountants just gonna do what the person told them to do. Say, okay, it’s in this one you told me to put it in there. Um And you don’t want them to be creative with that. You want the budget to match the chart of accounts. You want the chart of accounts and all of the expenses to go to the right place. But you don’t really know if that’s going to happen correctly. If you don’t train the people on the ground making the expenses sending in receipts if they don’t have the right information and you’re not kind of sharing that widely and having everyone understand with the chart of just the very basic things are and what, how to code things for your accountant. You’re really gonna get way off by the end of the year, you’re gonna, it doesn’t matter what fancy technology you have or if you have a 20% or 80% accountant, they’re doing what you’ve asked them to do. And so making sure that you’ve kind of got everybody buttoned up and, and learning what the basics are for your chart of accounts. And there’s not gonna be uh, one size fits all, like list of chart of account for every organization. That’s definitely something that comes out of programming comes out of requirements from your funders, It’s all related to your specific business. So we definitely went through some growing pains as we transitioned and had to essentially redo a lot of our chart of accounts because we realized our accountant that we had previously was sort of getting a little creative about which we didn’t provide any direction. And so they got creative on each month where these different same expense was going in a different chart. And so you have to sort of figure out how to unravel that. And then if it gets too far down the line, it’s really hard to do, it takes

[00:39:22.55] spk_0:
a lot, I don’t I don’t quite understand this one that you have to, you have to, so so you can educate me the way we were all supposed to educate the people who are spending the money when you say the chart of accounts, what why? I don’t understand why this is to everybody who’s out spending money, like you said, share the structure of your accounting system with widely, I don’t I don’t see what why that’s important.

[00:40:27.22] spk_2:
So let’s say, I mean I do this on a regular basis, so this is sort of my job is to make sure everyone in our organization knows what’s going on and how things code correctly. So, you know, let’s say at the beginning of the year, we’ve coded our organization provides professional development training, leadership training and um does some consulting work related to that as well. So we take a lot of our programming and we’ll bring it in house to people. So those are two different things. We have workshops that are open to the public and we have specialized consulting work that we do. So let’s say we have a consultant or a facilitator that we’ve hired to do a workshop. Well we’ve got a different chart of accounts essentially for saying how to split that consultants time. So we have one bucket that says, oh this is our consulting expense. But if you just put it in there and say, oh that’s a consulting expense or you know, this is a hired outside facilitator that we’ve brought in. But we don’t say whether it was for our workshops or for the, you know, the on site consulting specialized work that we’ve been contractually obligated to do with an organization.

[00:40:47.28] spk_0:
How

[00:40:48.49] spk_2:
are you going to know how much you spent

[00:40:50.86] spk_0:
for

[00:41:12.37] spk_2:
each of those different program types? So you really can have, and we have the same facilitators and they do different types of work for us at at all times, but we want to know at the end of the year what was our expense for our consulting work? What was our expense for our workshops and things like that? So we have to be very deliberate and understand when someone’s sending in an invoice or sending in a receipt that they’ve sort of coded that correctly.

[00:41:50.67] spk_0:
Okay, so it’s all a matter of like allocation to the right allocation to the right uh budget line or or general program area. The way you’re describing, you know, you have to you have two distinct areas, You are Alright, so allocating expenses and revenue, obviously two to the right, you know, not just that, it’s it’s just not generic revenue, but, you know, because at the end of the year we want to know what our expenses and our revenues are like in across. Well, in your example, you know, on both sides of the work that you’re doing, right? The public workshops and also the private consulting,

[00:41:58.74] spk_2:
right? Yeah. And so that can be really complicated if you let it sort of go down the wrong path. But you’ve got one of those really complicated federal funding grants and you’re not supposed to allocated a certain amount to this program. It’s really supposed to go to this program. Um,

[00:42:16.88] spk_0:
and

[00:42:17.10] spk_2:
you can kind of, you know, can be a lot of a bigger process to undo later on.

[00:42:22.88] spk_0:
Right, do it right the first time instead of trying to do forensic accounting to try to figure

[00:42:27.65] spk_1:
out. So

[00:42:28.76] spk_2:
it’s important for people who are, who are sending in those, you know, those pictures of their receipts on decks or expense. If I too have coded it correctly, before they send it to the accountant to make sure that they understand what account it’s supposed to go into or come out of.

[00:45:01.97] spk_0:
Okay, very helpful. Thank you. It’s time for Tony Take two. I’ll be on a panel endowment excitement, fundraising and management end quote. So where are you with your endowment? Do you have an endowment? You might be at zero or maybe you have a mid size middling endowment or you’ve got a vast endowment. The other three folks will be able to help you with endowment management principles. You probably don’t have a vast endowment. I bet there aren’t too many listeners who have vast endowments, but for the outliers, there’s something for you in this panel as well, for the vast majority of folks, no endowment or teensy weensy, itsy bitsy endowment or something in the middle. I’ll be doing the planned giving fundraising part of endowment excitement, fundraising and management. I’ll be the fundraising part. Talk about how planned giving is enormously valuable for endowment starting or endowment building. The other three folks there, the smart folks in endowment management. So we got the fundraising, we got the management doesn’t matter where you are in your endowment status capacity robustness, if you like. There’s something for you. It’s August 25 at noon eastern time. Oh and I should say we are sponsored graciously by an ex unite. Thank you and next unite. So to make your reservation, you go to N X unite dot com and you click webinars and panels and if you can’t join us on august 25th at noon, sign up and you’ll get the video. Of course it’s 2022 naturally. So I hope you’ll be with us either live or archive. That is Tony’s take two. We’ve got boo koo but loads more time for accounting for nonprofit leaders with Tasha Anderson and Zanny Miranda. Tasha. Your turn. You wanna, you wanna contribute.

[00:45:49.01] spk_1:
Yeah, yeah, I’ll contribute a little bit more to that one. But to kind of sum it up for me what I tell people. There’s usually a lot of frustration. I don’t understand my accounting and I usually tell people, it’s not that you’re using quickbooks and quickbooks is not sophisticated enough. It’s that it’s not set up the right way and then the user that’s using it is limited. And what I tell people kind of garbage and not that the work is entirely wrong. Right? It’s accurate. The dollar amounts accurate, the vendor is accurate, but if it’s not in put a certain way, then you’re not gonna be able to get reports out a certain way. So you kind of have to think more globally. Uh, you know, how do you want this to come out and then you have to understand the intricacies of the system in order to get the end result. So what Danny is referring to is just understanding high level, what is it that you want to see? How is that information can be put out and then making sure that the inputs are going in the right way so that you don’t have that forensic accounting that you mentioned trying to go back and figure that out. And so many organizations go through that forensic accounting exercise every time they have a simple report. Um, a simple report.

[00:46:17.39] spk_0:
Yeah, I’ve seen some of that. I know it’s it’s expensive. It’s, it’s time consuming. Didn’t have didn’t have to have been done badly to start with. All right. Let’s move on. Let’s move on,

[00:48:42.83] spk_1:
moving on. So the next one I would say, um, that nonprofit leader should share more about their financial information in their financial position with other people within the organization. And what do I mean by that? I kind of alluded to it earlier that I have been in situations where it’s just the Ceo and I carry the weight of the financial management, the financial, he’s right. And I’m not just talking like, oh my gosh, we have enough money to make payroll. I’m talking about being the person, the point person to explain to the board why we didn’t hit our fundraising goals, why our program contracts not fully utilized, why we were over underspending and salary expenses because we have vacancies in the various departments or what have you. Um, and that’s kind of what we’re talking about. It all kind of feeds together. So if we understand what those KPI S, those benchmarks, those metrics for measuring, we have an accounting structure in place to properly categorize and track these things, not just by thunder, but by department we customize our reporting in a way that’s meaningful. Maybe that that translates to creating a income statement or a financial report, a budget actual by department and then sharing with those that run those divisions of the business, their area of responsibility. That’s where I like to get to that the fundraising, you know, professional within the organization actually gets a periodic report. So they know what they spent in order to raise the money and where we’re at and what we expected them to do the same with the program team, same with anyone else that has that area of significant responsibility. And so often I see that again, the financial person and the ceo bear that responsibility and they end up being the money. Police, can I spend money for training? No, can I do that? It’s kind of crushing for morale a little bit that you have to police every dollar spent. And in a perfect world we would include all of these individuals in the budgeting process. Okay, fundraising department, what what do you need to spend this year? And how much honey are you bringing it? Same with the program team. You know, all of the different people involved. I like to get input from them. They give me their budgets on what they believe they need to spend to meet the outcomes and the objectives that they’ve laid out to do. So if that means we need to add another staff person, if that means we need to pay for more programs, supplies or go to a couple conferences, whatever it is. Um, let me know. So that when whenever you come and say, hey, can I, you know, attend this conference this year, I can then in return say was that in your budget and assuming the cash is available, people start owning their own things and there and we hold them accountable right,

[00:49:19.57] spk_0:
Right? Like delegating responsibility for the budget that you’re responsible for rather than rather than as you said, you know, having to ask, I mean you’re, you’re empowering folks, you’re educating them and empowering them to spend their budget responsibly. And obviously, you know, that’s part of performance review and, and, and through the benchmarks and the metrics that we talked about first, we’ll know whether you’re, whether you’re doing it accurately or

[00:49:26.46] spk_1:
not

[00:49:27.23] spk_0:
wisely or not. I guess it’s probably better than accurately, but Okay, Alright. So like delegating, delegating budget responsibility and accountability as well, of course.

[00:49:39.06] spk_1:
Alright, where’s

[00:49:43.20] spk_0:
the role of the board here, Tasha in should it just be a quarterly review of of the overall financial picture? Should it be every board meeting? Let’s take a board that meets, take a worst case scenario, a board that meets monthly. Do they need to see a monthly financial picture? Can it just be quarterly, semi annual? What, what do you think?

[00:52:09.36] spk_1:
Yeah, So that’s a great question. I think it kind of depends on the organization, uh, small struggling organization, I think probably needs more oversight than one. That’s pretty well figured it out and they’re pretty mature. I would say kind of best practices that you always provide financial reports at every board meeting. Um, maybe you don’t pour over it in a huge level of detail, but the reality of the fiduciary responsibility is up there with one of the top board responsibilities. So I personally would never recommend having a board meeting for which finances were not considered solely for that reason. Um, I will say a lot of the nuts and bolts of the oversight, the financial oversight. Oftentimes happens at the finance committee level. So oftentimes the finance committees will be reviewing more detailed reports on a monthly basis, asking whatever questions they need to ask, then, you know, usually a summarized version of that information is given to the overall board. I mean, we don’t definitely don’t want to spend board time discussing why we’re overspending and office supplies. Right? When we’re ignoring the, you know, the big elephant in the room on why we’re off of our fundraising projections by 50%. I think you had those conversations before. So we want to keep it really high level. Um, but the, the details get done at the finance committee level and the, um, the, the high level discussions happen at the board level. And I’ve seen the spectrum of some boards that are really involved in the financial management so much to say that it probably crosses the, uh, you know, some boundaries in terms of your role is oversight and not actually managing the organization. Um, and then I’ve seen some words that are probably too passive, uh, and will come back around once financially the organization starts struggling. And what I’ve seen that consistent, um, a consistent presence and a consistent accountability from the board. That’s what keeps organizations in a good place. I mean, if you just keep coming in and out once things start to get a little rocky may be having some consistency and some accountability will keep the pendulum swinging from one way to the other. So to answer your direct question, every board meeting I think should have a financial review. Um even if it’s only five minutes to just update everybody on, are we on track or we off track is usually what I like to tell people

[00:52:31.79] spk_0:
and it helps to have a finance committee that’s paying closer attention. If you’re, you know, if your board is has that expertise and and frankly is big enough, you know, a five person board may not, may not be big enough to have a finance committee and you don’t want to have just one person looking at it because that that’s a mistake. I think

[00:54:00.86] spk_1:
I want to say something to before we go into the last one, I don’t want to run out of time. But what I think is the most important thing cause I wanna, I wanna validate what you’re saying that not every board is big enough to have a finance committee. Um and not every board has an abundance of accountants lined up trying to join their board. I recognize that fact, what I think is really important, what I think what I like to do for our clients is to create the financial information um presented in such a way that they can have the board can ask questions and have fruitful conversation. What do I mean by that? Oftentimes they get all these really long reports with all these numbers. They don’t actually know what any of it means. And there’s this intimidation level where many board members just don’t feel comfortable asking questions out of fear of looking silly or uneducated. Right. And so what we do, we put together an executive summary. And so I would encourage anybody listening to have their account and create some sort of executive summary to give a narrative that explains the context or what’s really going on and more of a written format. Because if you just simply give financial reports, you’re gonna keep butting up against the same problem. So what I try to do is create a process that will drive conversations at the board level. So if we write, hey, we are off from our fundraising goals. This is a red flag or you know, maybe not in those exact alarming words, but they may not necessarily interpret that just by looking at the report. So, but if somebody read that, they could say, well, what are we going to do about fundraising?

[00:54:11.56] spk_0:
Right, context.

[00:54:14.57] spk_1:
Yes. Yes. And I think that that engages boards more to have some of those financial conversations. Um, so if that’s not being done, I would really recommend

[00:54:24.64] spk_0:
that. All right. Sandy, you have, we should be wrapping up with another one or two unless we combined or something. But as long as the content is there, you have, Do

[00:54:31.81] spk_2:
you think we combined a couple, particularly around succession planning and making sure you’ve got your processes in place? Because they’re sort of,

[00:54:39.89] spk_0:
we didn’t leave anything out there. Well,

[00:56:31.28] spk_2:
there’s one thing that I think Tasha was almost alluding to and if you if you’re answering yes to any of these questions, does my organization feel siloed? Are we not getting the right reports from my accountant as my program staff and development team, not communicating any of those details about what requirements are or when reports are due. If your board is sort of questioning things and they can’t figure out what’s happening if any of those things are happening, it’s really not your accounting, it’s your culture and so making sure that across the board accounting doesn’t just stop with the accounting team. It doesn’t just stop at the Ceo or the chief or executive level, I should say. You know, it’s really a team effort. Everyone in the organization, from the receptionist to the program staff to the board president, they all need to know maybe not every single detail of course, but they need to have a general picture and an idea of what is happening in the organization. And some people need to have more information than others. Like I would say, a program staff person needs to know very detailed information about their accounting as much or as the same amount. So they can have a great conversation with the accountant to make sure that they’re on track that they’ve got their budgets aligned and sort of creating a culture where you’re unsure what the other program team is making and how much money they have to work with versus how much you have. You know, why does my executive director keeps saying no to me spending money on these things that I think will boost morale or will actually get better outcomes for our program. What’s happening is that if those are questions that you’re having, it’s really time to examine what’s happening in your culture and maybe try to change some of that, um, sort of fear or change some of that mindset around sharing information about money,

[00:56:56.55] spk_0:
accounting may not be your problem. Maybe something deeper. Sometimes technology is blamed to the technology may not be the problem that maybe the culture in the organization Zanny where is nonprofit solutions and where are you? You may not be in the same place as

[00:57:46.31] spk_2:
I know. Now, now everyone can be everywhere. Of course we are based in SAn Diego. Uh, that is not our geographic limit though for nonprofit solutions. I also live in SAN Diego. Um, but we are online, so we do a lot of virtual workshops and trainings and we can also do our contractual work. Um, so if anyone wanted to hire us for leadership training and um, we do have a lot of management training for new managers. So that is all can be done virtually and we’re now that things are starting to get a little bit easier to to come together. We used to do everything in person and so now we’re slowly getting back to in person but I would say the majority of our work is virtual so we can really be anywhere in any time zone. What’s

[00:58:04.96] spk_0:
the website for nonprofit solutions?

[00:58:06.91] spk_2:
It’s N. P. Solutions dot org.

[00:58:11.39] spk_0:
Okay, Tasha, where where’s the charity CFO, wherever you are, That’s where the charity CFO is.

[00:58:27.72] spk_1:
That’s right. Well, our office, our headquarters and all of our team are based here in ST louis Missouri. So although we work remotely with our clients, our team is centered here in ST louis. We do have not Office, we collaborate here, however, um only about 30% of our clients are here in ST Louis, the rest are all over the country from coast to coast. So we work with clients all over the place in the United States

[00:58:38.12] spk_0:
and what’s what’s the website for charity? CFO,

[00:58:40.91] spk_1:
yep, it’s the charity CFO dot com.

[00:58:44.29] spk_0:
Okay, I love I love Missouri because I lived for five years in Warrensburg. Warrensburg where where Whiteman Air Force Base is,

[00:58:53.37] spk_1:
I

[00:59:03.01] spk_0:
was in the Air Force for five years. So I lived in Warrensburg, we used to spend more time in Kansas city because it was closer but we went to some ball games in ST louis. Okay. All right. Uh Tasha Anderson, founder and Ceo of the charity CFO and Zani Miranda Operations Manager at nonprofit solutions. Thank you very much. Thanks for each of you sharing. Thank you.

[00:59:19.83] spk_1:
Got

[00:59:22.92] spk_0:
a great balance between professional C P A. And the the practicing learning client who’s who’s got some significant accounting responsibility but not a C P A. I love the balance. Thank you

[00:59:32.47] spk_1:
very much. Thank

[00:59:33.73] spk_2:
you. Thanks

[01:00:48.65] spk_0:
to our listeners for being with tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 22 N. T. C. Thanks so much for being with us Next week. Our final 22. NTC show your tech problem is actually a people’s problem. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c. O. And by fourth dimension technologies. Their product is I. T. Infra in a box, the affordable tech solution for nonprofits, but they’ve got the free offer going on. So that is at tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant D just like three D. But they do want to mention deeper. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff shows social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by scott stein, Thank you for that. Affirmation Scotty B with me next week for nonprofit radio big nonprofit ideas for the other 95 go out and be great

Nonprofit Radio for August 2, 2021: The Surprising Gift Of Doubt

My Guest:

Marc Pitman: The Surprising Gift Of Doubt

That’s Marc Pitman’s new book. It’s stuffed with strategies to help leaders—and future leaders—lead better. Marc is founder of Concord Leadership Group.

 

 

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Board relations. Fundraising. Volunteer management. Prospect research. Legal compliance. Accounting. Finance. Investments. Donor relations. Public relations. Marketing. Technology. Social media.

Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio.

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[00:00:10.84] spk_2:
Hello and welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio

[00:02:01.74] spk_0:
Big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast and oh I’m glad you’re with me, I’d suffer with elia tibial band syndrome if you irritated me with the idea that you missed this week’s show the surprising gift of doubt. That’s Mark Pittman’s new book, it’s stuffed with strategies to help leaders and future leaders lead better. Mark is founder of Concord Leadership Group on tony state too, sharing is caring, we’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot C O and by sending blue the only all in one digital marketing platform empowering non profits to grow. tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant end in blue. Mhm It’s my pleasure to welcome marc Pittman to the show. He is founder of Concord Leadership Group, he helps leaders lead their teams with more effectiveness and less stress. His latest book is the surprising gift of doubt. Use uncertainty to become the exceptional leader you are meant to be. You may know him also as the bow tie guy, Mark has caught the attention of media organizations as diverse as the chronicle of philanthropy, Al Jazeera Fox News, Success magazine and Real simple the book and the company are at concord leadership group dot com and he’s at Mark eh pittman, Mark Pittman an overdue Welcome to nonprofit radio

[00:02:05.44] spk_1:
It is an honor to be here. Thanks tony

[00:02:07.85] spk_0:
I’m not sure why you haven’t been on years ago and and many times before. So I, I feel bad about that because you’re a smart guy and you have lots of good, you have lots of good content, lots of good ideas and uh, that’s why I say long overdue.

[00:02:20.44] spk_1:
Well thank you. My head may not fit out of the office after this kind words don’t

[00:02:44.34] spk_0:
get carried away. Okay. But you do, you do have a lot of good ideas, including the ideas that are in your new book. And I want to start with having you explain how agonizing doubt can be a gift. Please help us understand

[00:04:06.44] spk_1:
That. Uh, it’s I’ve been executive coach for 18 years now and it’s one of the things that really surprises people the most is the fact that high performers, first of all don’t tend to know how to ask for help and then they get derailed when they start feeling doubt because they start feeling like there, they’re faking it, that they’re the, you know, the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain there, look at him. Um, because they’re they’re producing results, but they’re not sure how uh and that doubt can be very destabilizing. But the gift is, it can force us to look internally for our own cues. Look to look to look in areas where we’ve been told are soft or you know, they’re they’re woo. Um look at things that make us unique and it actually clarifies our leadership because it’s very much about the the grain of our wood, the way that we put a spin on things as opposed to just doing all the best benchmarked activities that are out there. Um Yeah, so the surprising gift of that is that it can make it to me. What I’ve seen to do is instead of having that inner critic saying I must be broken, I must be just must I probably shouldn’t even be in this position. It shifts the conversation to why might I be perfect for this role? Why might my organization be exactly the voice that the sector needs to have right now?

[00:04:17.64] spk_0:
And there is a lot of introspection involved in the I guess the overall work that you’re describing and we’ll go into some detail about about. But you need to be reflective introspective,

[00:05:15.04] spk_1:
right? Which often is something that a lot of leaders don’t, there’s not a lot of there’s so much need in and organizations that there’s not often a lot of time given for professional development or leadership growth and so people don’t think of at the time as doing reflection as legit leadership work. They feel like when we’re in early in careers, were or even in school we get graded on what we accomplish. We take tests, we do tasks, we complete tasks and that becomes how we are promoted as we move into management and leadership. It’s taking that time to reflect is so incredibly important. But we haven’t seen it modeled that much. Um so there is, you’re right, Absolutely right. There’s a lot of introspection but there’s also that’s what leaders do. They no longer they provide, they no longer just making sure things get done. But they’re also looking forward to see where should we be going, where should we skating to where the puck is I guess even though I’m not a sports guy, I grew up in Maine. So there’s a lot of hockey there. Uh

[00:05:50.04] spk_0:
Thank you. Yeah. Any any sports analogy will be largely lost on me. Oh sports ball. I’m not familiar with basketball. So I wouldn’t know that skating uh metaphor now. And I want to reassure folks that this is not only material for current leaders but future emerging leaders.

[00:06:56.84] spk_1:
Absolutely. When part of what what we when we’re going through our leaders journey. If we can identify the earlier, we can identify what makes us different, what makes us unique? Where our limits, where where are we really good uh Where can we excel? It can help us position our leadership roles so that we’re not being squeezed into somebody else’s box as much as possible. The organizations are clear our artificial, they’re they’re not uh they’re not perfect. So we’re always going to have to do things that we don’t enjoy or we don’t like. But we can definitely there are things we can do in our environment and our our schedules and the people that are around us that can help us or can really hinder us. So the earlier we know, even as people are going through their own personal growth journey, uh the more that they can identify these, the uniqueness is uh that they that they bring to the table the better somebody was asking a previous podcast, can you throw these conversations? Can you throw some of the, if you’re being interviewed for something, can you just answer the questions the way that you think they want them to be answered? And you could, but you may get the job that you don’t want,

[00:07:22.64] spk_0:
right? That may not be in your best self interest or your own self interest, right. Um, you know, I can see how you, would you be soothing as a coach? Just your voice. Great. See I have that. I have that new york. I grew up in New Jersey, but close enough to new york city. Don’t throw. I got that east coast, But you have a, I mean, you’re northern. You said you grew up in Maine. Now you’re in south Carolina. You have a, have a soothing way about your voice.

[00:07:29.21] spk_1:
Well, thank you. Mark, After Dark was going to be my, uh, my DJ handle Mark

[00:07:34.67] spk_0:
after dark. Uh doing Alison steal the night bird.

[00:07:38.66] spk_1:
Then it turns out there was already a Mark after dark. So I’d have to spell dark with the C.

[00:07:42.23] spk_0:
Uh Okay, we’ll do it. Here we go. All right, claim it. Uh Just your your voice has a softening calming quality to it.

[00:08:21.24] spk_1:
I’ve been told that I’ve had some people come to me and one um they kind of want me to be there, boss. Some business owners and some non profit executives are well, I want to coach is going to tell me exactly what to do and make it, you know, make it hurt to not do it. That’s not who I am. I’m sure there are those coaches out there that are drill sergeants. But um, I believe most leaders are really hard pressed and doing the best they can. And so I like to be able to encourage them and kind of blow on the coals the fire that’s almost going out and rekindle their passion to do it themselves,

[00:08:25.30] spk_0:
coaching with compassion.

[00:08:26.94] spk_1:
Nice, wow dot com. I’ll get that coaching

[00:09:02.74] spk_0:
with compassion, the compassionate coach, the bow tie guy in the compassionate coach. I want to dive into something that very interesting to me, but you have it buried, It’s buried on page 98, Okay, it’s the Pittman family homework that you used to do. Tell me about that you you covered in just a couple of sentences. To me, it was a little bit of a gloss over because I’m very interested in what got you to where you are and what informs your coaching. And and I got to believe that the Pittman family homework is integral in

[00:10:17.04] spk_1:
here. Absolutely. As I look at my bookshelf, they many of the books are things that I grew up reading. So my family, we had schoolwork because we were students at school, but my sister and I also had homework for being pigments, so we had to read positive mental attitude books, had to listen to motivational speakers, um and we had to go to events seminars, rallies, those sort of things where people were talking about goal setting and uh living your dream and at all. Um my parents were just amazed that they hadn’t been taught this, they were learning it with us and they were shocked that they had never been taught goal setting or dreaming or leadership or people skills and they didn’t want us to be inflicted with missing that before we left the house. So um I didn’t know other people might, I thought everybody had homework because they’re in their family, but I was starting to read is I I have been reading dale Carnegie, how to, when friends and influence people, uh frank Becker’s high raised myself from failure to success in selling charlie, tremendous jones life is tremendous listening to his executor of Florence, the Tower Les Brown growing up, that part of the, part of the way you, one of our kind of traditions too was having a motivational speaker on what were in the shower, So we would always have a stack of tapes next to the next to a kind of boom box and uh, we would just put them on what we’re doing our thing and then, you know, the person is done when the tape goes off,

[00:10:35.44] spk_0:
that’s when you know your showers done. So yeah, I mean this is the days before, waterproof, uh, phones and ipods. So

[00:11:02.64] spk_1:
my wife knew that she, she said she knew she was when we were dating, she knew she was dating an entrepreneur because I had a whole bunch of tapes, she had to clear off to the passenger seat of the car. It was just so used to listening to you different tape series and uh, you know, Kiyosaki reached that port ad and all sorts of different. Yeah, always learning, trying to always the

[00:11:04.18] spk_0:
one after after Kurosawa, what did you say

[00:11:49.84] spk_1:
your sake robert? Kiyosaki wrote a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad in a series after that Dad, Poor Dad. Yeah, just different ways. People, different mindsets. People have about money and security and, and it’s really helpful and going into fundraising was really helpful to have this kind of being able to speak the language of your donors is one of the most important things um, in fundraising and having been exposed to this literature, that the other leaders were being exposed to make it a lot easier to talk to them. In fact, my first talks in, uh, first professional talks were translating marketing things in sales for fundraisers Because sales was the s word 25 years ago. And uh, so I would take like Seth Godin’s idea, virus information, marketing and make it so I fully attribute it, but I’d make it so that it was understandable to how this could work in a non profit.

[00:13:00.54] spk_0:
It’s time for a break. Turn to communications, The Chronicle of philanthropy, The new york Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today stanford Social Innovation Review, the Washington Post, The Hill Cranes, nonprofit quarterly Forbes Market Watch. That’s where turned to clients have gotten recent exposure. You want that kind of exposure for yourself, for your expertise turn to has the relationships that can make it happen. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o. Now, let’s go back to the surprising gift of doubt. So this Pittman family homework, which obviously as you’re describing, you know, evolved through the, through the decades, you’re continually continually learning even today, you say that the book a couple of places. Um, but this was an elementary school. You mean, there are, there are really considered this doctrine nation?

[00:13:43.14] spk_1:
Oh, absolutely, yeah. Looking back on it. It totally was. And when charlie, totally, well, my uh, charlie, tremendous jones became a mentor of mine, which he had been a hero of my universe because I love this book. Um, and he said, when I was looking with our kids, he said, oh, I would never do it that way with, as your parents said, I would teach, have them do stories, I’d have them, uh, have your kids read biographies and be inspired by stories as opposed to reading how to literature. But okay. I probably because of my upbringing, I love I love nonfiction. I love reading a good how to book on leadership are in goal setting or vision casting storytelling. Yeah.

[00:13:46.65] spk_0:
Credit credit department parents. Well

[00:14:08.74] spk_1:
one time Sandy Reese was interviewing me And she uh years ago and she came up with a, she catalogued all the books that I referenced in the talk uh just in a conversation because I still read 50-75 books a year. Um to and and I had to set a goal years ago to read nonfiction because that’ll make me a better storyteller. But I had to set it as a goal. Now I can fully enjoy reading nonfiction. I mean, reading fiction. Sorry. Really? Sorry. Yeah. Reading the fiction books that are enjoyable. I always thought was cheating, but now it’s a goal. So I’m okay said a certain number of goals for fiction books I want to read in the year

[00:14:27.00] spk_0:
And 50-75 a year. You still read?

[00:15:04.14] spk_1:
Yeah, I’m cranking through books this year to I don’t know why, but I love what part of it is. There’s just I want to keep fresh when I’m writing a book. I tried not to not read in the genre that I’m writing it. So I didn’t read a lot of leadership books. I was doing surprising gift of doubt because I didn’t want to um mistakenly like take over somebody else’s thoughts that should be attributed to them because I really do think crediting the source is really important um which this book even get more more to the point. The editors were even more insistent that I double and triple checked my references, which I thought was wonderful.

[00:15:04.86] spk_0:
Yes, there’s a bunch of endnotes haven’t

[00:15:07.42] spk_1:
been pushed this hard in a while, so I’m really, really pleased with the team that helped me with this one.

[00:15:18.74] spk_0:
Something you say early on is that the motivation is within you expand on that for us.

[00:15:24.84] spk_1:
Well the part of the I don’t remember exactly, I know that was part of the chapter. Sorry, you don’t have to flip through the pages, you know you write a book and then you know quiz on

[00:15:38.64] spk_0:
Page 16 or something but you talk about the motivation, motivation for leadership and and good and just good intentions is within you.

[00:17:06.04] spk_1:
Yeah, I think part of what we uh we spent so much of our life and another part of the book. I I do this map of the leaders journey where it’s a four quadrant section where we start off on the confidence scale, which is the vertical scale and we go down to ensure we’re gonna talk about the leaders journey. Okay, well that’s part of it is that we are so used to looking externally for are accused that the we forget to look internally and find out what what what what do we value? What are we passionate about? What are two things we forget. We forget to to actually give them air. And often we don’t really permit ourselves to define what we value or we hold onto because we’re looking for others uh for cues either the culture or systems. But the other thing that we somehow don’t do is we don’t credit them as being unique traits. We think everybody must be like us, you and I both wear glasses and it’s almost like we forget that we’re wearing glasses at times. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of trying to find your glasses and they’re right there on your face. They’re not even on your head, right on your face. You uh get fingerprints all over my glasses when I do that. But we often this stuff that’s within us is often the stuff that makes us unique, makes us a valued part of the team. And we just kind of write it off as a weird quirk of our own, not something that’s worth giving attention to.

[00:17:22.44] spk_0:
It’s it’s some it’s among those natural strengths. You talk about natural strengths for versus learned skills. Yeah, our natural strengths, you’re right. We I guess we we be minimized. I’m thinking of everybody, Everybody is that smart or everybody thinks about

[00:18:49.24] spk_1:
that or if I can do it quickly, then I must not be work. I remember being in a early job. I loved was fundraising for prep school and I loved it. I just loved the traveling. I loved the, you know, when I was home at the boarding school, being at the table with the 10 other students, 10 students and my, my wife and I were the faculty parents. And um, I love the kind of matching school’s mission with donors values and trying to see if there was a fit and being okay if there wasn’t, but being excited if there were that all excited me. But I didn’t think I could enjoy work that much. So I was talking with the faculty colleague and I tried to make it sound really hard, you know, because there’s a lot of stuff that is hard. The travel isn’t that inspiring, There’s delays. And also I tried to really accentuate the bad stuff and he looked over at me, he said, you love your work, don’t you? And I felt so guilty because I totally did. And then I found out he didn’t, he would never want to do what I was doing because every day was different every day I had to come up on the spot with different answers and um, and I didn’t know what, I had no idea who was going to call, what I was going to, who I was gonna see what opportunities are going to rise. He liked being in his classroom and knowing this is the curriculum and this is where I can adjust if we go too long in one area, if we go too fast on another. He, he loved that stability. Uh, and that’s where I started realizing that the stuff that I thought was just kind of, everybody would want to do this. And I, yeah, I kind of got lucky is, no, not everybody wants to do this. And any fundraisers listening to those knows that because we’re usually the oddballs out of the nonprofit, we’re the ones that are outward focused in ways that others aren’t.

[00:19:06.34] spk_0:
What do we talk about the four quadrants of your journey? Um, you have some self assessments that folks are just gonna have to buy the book to do. We’re not gonna be able to talk through the details of Okay, health assessments, but, but the leaders journey through the four, the four quadrants, I think that’s valuable. And especially moving from quadrant 2-3.

[00:21:36.94] spk_1:
Sure. So the, uh, what I loved about creating part of, I’ve been trying for 18 years to explain what I do with with as a coach. And this was the first time when I created this four quadrant methodology was the first time people repeated it back to me, they understood it, and my wife looked at and said, well this is me is learning, this isn’t just leadership, but the the axes again our confidence vertically and then inputs horizontally. Quadrant one is where your high confidence and you’re looking externally. So most leaders only get half the map, we don’t get the whole map, we only get the external half. So we we started a quadrant where we’ve seen other people lead and so we start copying them. Somebody gives us the ability to run a project or to lead a team. Um some sort of leadership and either we’re super excited because we’ve known where a leader finally somebody else sees it or were scared, but we have the confidence from the other people that they’re going to do it, that’s and that’s where we just try to do what they’ve done. Um, some of the people that I listened to growing up, some of the motivational speakers would say if, if you’re leading a team and you turn around and there’s no one behind you, you’re just out for a walk. That’s when your confidence starts going down, which I dipping into the quadrant two, which is the experiment quadrant where you start trying to figure out, okay, what worked for tony didn’t work for me. Like tony has his own way of doing things and it’s not clearly not working for me. When I say jump, people don’t say how high, what do I need, where the deficiencies and how do I fix them? And that’s where you start taking courses, you start getting certifications, reading books, going to seminars, going to conferences, listening to podcasts, so it’s people skills or um, closing on sales or fundraising, uh, anything and met most leaders kind of stay in quadrant two lurching from success to success. They have so much success that the people around them, I feel like, oh yeah, this is, they’re going to pull the rabbit out of the hat again. We know that whatever she does, she’s an amazing leader. Um, but she, the leader herself is wondering, is seeing all the deficits, all the deficiencies, all the stuff that they don’t have measured up. And that’s where the doubt builds up inside them to think, well maybe I’m not the right person if they have the opportunity, sometimes it’s just through strain and stress, Sometimes it’s through coaching to see that there’s a whole map and the other half of the map is all the internal cues. So the external cues are great because it tells us how we learn and there are good systems that we can learn from. But when we moved

[00:22:15.74] spk_0:
before, I want to just make sure folks are clear about what the, what the horizontal and please, these are labeled. So the so the vertical is confident and unsure, so confident on top, unsure at the bottom. And then the horizontal is external and internal. So when you’re in quadrant, when you’re in quadrant one, you’re observing and you’re you’re confident and that’s the confident external quadrant

[00:22:21.64] spk_1:
quadrant

[00:22:22.76] spk_0:
two. That’s the unsure external

[00:22:27.40] spk_1:
and you’re trying to fix what’s wrong? Yes, we’re talking about

[00:22:29.65] spk_0:
right now. I just wanna make sure everybody’s clear

[00:22:43.34] spk_1:
and that’s the cost. So I find the magic happens at the when people are moved from quadrant, the quadrant three, which is the they’re still on the unsure half of the map, but you’re moving internally to figure out. So let me illustrate like this. Have you read getting things done by David Allen?

[00:22:48.64] spk_0:
Uh No, I haven’t.

[00:22:49.96] spk_1:
Okay, well it’s 13,000 listeners. They’ve heard of it. Okay. They’ve heard of it. Great.

[00:22:53.69] spk_0:
The audiences better red than the host. I. Sure.

[00:24:17.84] spk_1:
So the if you if you read a book, like getting things done is valentine management and you only implement 10% of it in quadrant two, you’re going to think, wow, I failed it. Another thing, I can only get 10% of this. The book says it changed people’s lives. It’s not changing my lives. I just write lists. That’s all I got out of this Quadrant three is where you shift the question too. Huh? I wonder what either. I wonder why that didn’t work for me. What is it, what is it about the book or? It’s shifting the focus to, wow, I got 10% that 10% is really helpful. This writing list things with the next action item really actually is really helpful. And as one of my mentors said years ago, eat the chicken, spit out the bones. All right. The chicken for me and getting things done is writing lists. I don’t have to do the whole reviews and the files cabinets and all this other stuff that has helped other people. It’s not gonna help me. And as you start building in quadrant three, we’re looking at your hard wiring, looking at your stories, you tell yourself, looking at your goal, setting your mission, your your values, your personal style. It starts building up your confidence again because we’re in quadrant two, you’re just seeing all your what you lack in that you’re afraid somebody’s going to figure out that you’re really just faking it In quadrant three. You start seeing why some of the things work the way they do for you, um why your organization doesn’t necessarily do whatever all the other organizations are doing, but you don’t have it just a it’s not just a whim or feeling, it’s you start being able to have the language to be able to express what why you do what you do and that builds your confidence back up to Quadrant four, which is a focused leader. Quadrant

[00:24:39.24] spk_0:
Okay, Before you go to four, Yeah, A lot of people get stuck in in the second quadrant. absolutely. And the transition from 2-3, you find a lot of people in your practice and generalized beyond that stuck in that second quadrant what we’re working, we’re working with external systems that are not not being rewarded or

[00:24:48.50] spk_1:
not looking for the next guru, looking for the next framework.

[00:24:51.29] spk_0:
Why is it why is why are so many people stuck into looking for this external help? That’s it’s routinely not not fulfilling for them.

[00:26:11.14] spk_1:
I think part of it is because we were raised that way. We look for parents for cues, we look for coaches for cues, we look forward to look to externally to teachers, to grade our work bosses, to give us uh you know, performance reviews, and I think we’re taught probably at least in the cultures that I work into not really trust ourselves, do not trust the inner voice, the nudges that we’re getting, because those are soft, we should look for hard data, we should look for benchmarking, we should we should see what others are doing. Um There there are good things with looking at others, but it’s just not the complete picture, I think it really needs, it’s like an introvert that is trying to copy of extroverts boss. So the extroverts uh mentor walks around the office, talks to people, gets energized by doing that, has a high level of energy with the personal relationships. Um, an introvert boss, this introvert that’s trying to be, you know, an emerging leader, maybe we’ll get drained from that. It’s not that they can’t be social and be engaging, but it’s it’s not energizing for them. So they’ll need to take a lot of time to recharge their batteries, but they won’t necessarily give them the, if they don’t look internally to realize, oh, I’m wired differently. They’ll try to keep forcing themselves into somebody else’s mold. Um, you know, the, the, the proverbial square peg in a round hole,

[00:26:14.64] spk_0:
Okay, somebody else’s mold being based on the way we grew up, Like you’re saying

[00:26:18.87] spk_1:
the external, Yeah. Teachers,

[00:26:20.19] spk_0:
parents, bosses trying to fit into. We’re accustomed to trying to fit their molds

[00:26:58.04] spk_1:
well and think about it. Non profits to, yeah, boards, Every board member seems to come in with their own kind of mold for how a nonprofit should work or how leaders should work or how something should get done. And what is incumbent on us as bored as nonprofits to help with the boards is to onboard them to train them to. This is how our, our nonprofit works. These are our values as a non profit. This is how we do things. The communication styles will have, we will not go back behind each other’s back in gossip. That is not how we operate here. Um, but that often dad on boarding and board, uh, board orientation often doesn’t happen. So you’re stuck with a bunch of people that have these external moles that they want to try to force the leaders and the staff and the nonprofit into that aren’t necessarily helpful or in line with what the nonprofits therefore

[00:30:19.54] spk_0:
or even worse than not helpful. Yeah, thank you. Detrimental, hazardous oxygen you know, It’s time for Tony’s take two, sharing is caring who do you know that you can share? non profit radio with please. I know you’ve got lots of folks, But let’s just focus on one out of all your circles, all your spheres of influence your networks, your friends, lovers loved ones, hope lovers, our loved ones. Well not necessarily right. No, I take that back. That’s not necessary. I mean eventually, but maybe not necessarily now husbands, wives, Children, grandchildren, ex husbands, ex wives, ex partners, ex boyfriend’s ex girlfriends. Maybe maybe among all these exes, maybe you’re trying to get back together. non profit radio could be the conduit, the method that opens that door. Look, I’ve been thinking about you in very, very special ways. You need to start listening to nonprofit radio Mhm I realize now you’re the light and the love of my life. Please start listening to nonprofit radio it’ll help your career and then when we get back together it’ll bring you and us to retirement security, what better what better way to get back together than income and retirement security? non profit radio is the conduit for your long term security as you’re getting back with your ex non profit radio Look please who can you share? non profit radio with who’s going to benefit? They don’t have to work for a nonprofit, you know, board members, board members are great listeners to nonprofit radio so give it some thought among all your spheres and all your contacts and and okay influence. Who could you share? non profit radio with I’d be grateful. Let them know about the show. I’m not gonna pitch it to you. You you already know what the show is That is Tony’s take two now back to the surprising gift of doubt. So they’re moving from 2-3. I know you I know you already did this, but because you are ready to go from 3-4. But uh, you know, for it, this is great. You’re suffering a lackluster host. So I’m just processing and you’ve been thinking about this for decades. Yeah, but I’m still, I’m still processing. So The moving from 2-3, I kind of saw that as as a synthesis of

[00:30:21.85] spk_1:
all

[00:30:22.37] spk_0:
these different systems that you don’t call it. Synthesis.

[00:30:24.91] spk_1:
No, I know that

[00:30:59.24] spk_0:
you’re doing all your work. You can think about it for decades. You call it analyzed, I call it synthesis. I like it. You’re free to call it analyzed Of course. I I thought of it as a synthesis of all the things that you attempted in, in these external systems, the books, the webinars, the weeklong leadership conferences, whatever they were that were only partially or maybe not at all helping you, but you extract out what does, what does have value you and and you make sense of it and you emerge in a better place. And that’s to me that was the synthesis of I

[00:31:42.84] spk_1:
like that you’re the next quadrant and you also learn some of the some of the patterns that you fall fall into. You start reflecting enough to say, oh wait, I’m doing that again. Does that mean I’m stressed or? Um there’s one of the assessments of Hollande’s ability battery, uh which tests you on how you actually perform on things. It’s not how do you feel about, would you rather read a book or go to a movie? It’s not questions like that, but it’s do this task under time pressure and it shows what comes quickly to you. One of the things that came out for me early in my career was rhythm memory, which is a kinesthetic type of learning. Um it’s and it’s also tied to a desire to move around. So I’ve always looked for jobs that involved moving around because I knew that that would be more life giving and energizing for me. What that meant was that I never liked your

[00:31:45.89] spk_0:
work at the, at the prep school. Right. Exactly,

[00:32:35.84] spk_1:
Absolutely right. But that also changed my career trajectory because I realized many of the major gift fundraisers that I’d seen that went into management became very frustrated because they had to manage other people that were doing the work and they actually wanted to do the work. So I I took some ownership of my own career path and moved into positions that um allowed me to still have that kind of external. I’m an extrovert, you know, movement. So that kind of synthesis is also the internal synthesis of this is my way of operating in the world. And I want to try to put myself as much as possible in ways that work with that. Um not that I don’t want to grow, not that I don’t want to be stretched or challenged, but I also don’t want to put myself in a position where I’m just going to languish, although that’s sometimes what the right career path should be when the headhunters call, they want to see a paper career path of associate to manager to director to senior VP or something. Which may not be the way that is realistic for for people.

[00:32:53.24] spk_0:
Alright, so now

[00:32:54.72] spk_1:
move talking from

[00:33:35.24] spk_0:
experience. Well you at least you at least have you at least would would be uh would look good on paper and do look good on paper. I I would I would never be, I can’t be an employee. I would I would fail the, I would fail the screening interview with With the headhunter assistant assistant. I won’t even get to the associate level. I remember the managing director, I don’t know how I get the headhunter cause I’d be 20 minutes late just because II felt like why should I be on time for you? And then if I ever made it to the, if I ever made it to the interview, which I never would. But if I met, if I met a principal in the organization, I’d be sure I’d show up late, I’d be in sneakers. No, I just, I was unemployable. Everything I could because I know I’d be, I’d be a shitty employee. I just don’t fit them up. So I would I be doing them a favor by wasting their time.

[00:33:52.14] spk_1:
That’s awesome. Yeah.

[00:33:54.04] spk_0:
So move us into the fourth for those, for those who are more suited to, uh, working in organization, you’re moving to a level of you mentioned at one point, Grace, you’re leading with grace and finesse. I think you say

[00:34:34.94] spk_1:
right? And, and there’s a, it’s because you’ve got the kind of confidence in the peace of mind of knowing why you’re doing things differently. So instead of just thinking about, I must be so bad because I can’t get energized. I don’t like going all the social events night after night. Um you start realizing why what fills you up and what fills your organization, your team, your whatever your organization is. Uh and that grows your confidence to that fourth quadrant, which I called focused, but I don’t want to make it sound like it’s nirvana, it’s not all blissful because we’re still dealing with human beings and we’re one ourselves. Um Leadership

[00:34:45.12] spk_0:
is still a challenge and Absolutely yeah,

[00:35:39.54] spk_1:
but you now have a much, you have the full map, you can look at and look at, do I need to find somebody to copy? Do I need to learn skills from people? Do I need to uh go to a class or get a podcast or read a book or do I need to actually figure out what, what the synthesizing? Do I need to analyze what I’ve consumed already or are organisations consume to figure out why are we doing it differently? Um One of the things I also want to be clear on is that the data can be helpful, so I don’t want to discredit external stuff uh with fundraising in particular, uh, when fundraising letters, we know if they’re chatty er and they use you, they get better response than if there uh, boring things that essays that would get a high school, a grade A from high school teacher, um, we know that we know that and there are some non profits that might be tempted to say we don’t we want to be more business like. Um and so it’s not just throwing out all the data that’s out there, but synthesizing it. I’m really stuck on that word. Thank you for that.

[00:36:27.53] spk_0:
Third quadrant synthesis. Yeah, that’s the way I’m one reader. Just one reader. That’s that’s the way I conceived of it. All right, So All right. So we got these quadrants of sort of progression out of the four corners. Sound like something out of the Matrix, but I didn’t watch much of that series so I can’t go beyond that. Uh, so let’s leave it there, analogy. Um, you talk about, you mentioned earlier earlier storytelling and you talk a good bit about different stories. Stories that we tell ourselves stories about the organization. Talk talk some about the stories we tell ourselves.

[00:37:49.53] spk_1:
That’s one of the things that I think a lot of us don’t reflect on is the kind of self talk that’s going on in our head all the time. Um, the two that I talked about that are the comstock stories there either the ones that you tell people when you’re meeting them for the first time. So we often have kind of go to stories where it helps position, helps people position us in their mind. Um, so maybe some people like laugh lines, some people like uh you know what their education history is or their career history. There’s certain things we go to because we start paying attention to those, we can start seeing if they really reflect what we’re trying to do. Often we get stuck in these from a different time in our life and we just kind of tell the same stories because we think we’re gonna get the same response. The one that the other type of stock story that that happens is um with Jessica Sharp here in Greenville is really cattle. It has her clients whose catalogue the self talk going through and just for a day or a couple of days listing all the different things that enter your head and that takes some discipline, especially doing non judgmentally, but things like I always fail, I always mess that up, but I can’t, I’m never good at that. Um, writing them down on a piece of paper and then after your time holding that paper up and just asking a little reviewing them and then she asks her clients to say, would you talk to a friend like this? And oftentimes our thoughts are so toxic, were actually filling and polluting our heads because we’re so hard on ourselves.

[00:37:56.74] spk_0:
We’re saying to ourselves that we wouldn’t even say to others right? Or placing ourselves with them,

[00:38:07.92] spk_1:
right? Exactly. So her invitations, why don’t you become a better friend of yourself? Which I think it’s really, I don’t know if you’ve experienced to tell you, but it’s very hard sometimes when, when you’re used to being hard on yourself to loosen up, lighten up because it feels like you might just, I, I feel like I might just go off the rails if I’m too kind to myself. I need to be really hard, you know, and just like

[00:38:30.72] spk_0:
you need to be a little stricter, otherwise I’m gonna get reckless, right? You know, if, if I, if I loosen up and you know, something, something, something careless, I’ll do something careless or something along those lines.

[00:38:38.96] spk_1:
I’m self employed. But I often joke that my boss is kind of a jerk.

[00:38:43.82] spk_0:
Uh, I am too, but I, I don’t have a good joke like that. My wife had the lackluster host.

[00:38:48.97] spk_1:
You stand there you go. My wife, my wife reminds me that I am the boss is so I can,

[00:39:30.92] spk_0:
you know, you listened as a coach, you listen to a lot of, a lot of people who are stuck in quadrant two, uh beating themselves up and whatever they are and they might even be in there might even be in the grace and finesse quadrant quadrant four, but they’re still, they’re still hard on themselves or the, or the work is hard on them. How does it, how do you not generalize all coaches? How do you as a coach keep uh stay positive? Like go from one coaching session to the next to the next to the next in a day or even if there’s a couple of days, I mean how do you continue to relate as a positive human being when you’re hearing tough story after tough story after, you know, maybe insurmountable challenge? Uh

[00:40:54.41] spk_1:
people incredibly, that’s a great question. I find people incredibly fascinating and um I am a glass is always full kind of guy, not half full or half empty, it’s always full of water or air. So uh there’s a strong, strong sense of optimism that I, I bring to the table and resiliency I guess because even people that are going through hard things, it’s one of one of the postcards I carry in my bag when I trapped when I used to travel and hopefully start again uh says just when the caterpillar thought his life was over, he became a beautiful butterfly. Um and so there’s that sense of, even the ends are often beginnings for people. Uh there’s definitely times where I have to do some, some of my own stuff like um center, you know, some meditation practices and other things just exercise to keep the headset. But um I’ve seen so many people transform themselves into people that they wanted to be, but they weren’t really sure they could be. That gives me the hope as I keep going from call to call. And sometimes it doesn’t seem like the calls gang up time when toxicity to another toxicity. Um,

[00:40:55.18] spk_0:
I mean you need your own, you need self care. Well,

[00:41:53.21] spk_1:
yeah. And I also, one of the things the privilege of being a coach is that you get to not be in the hiring and firing space with these people. So you get to be with them. And it’s, it’s almost, I’ve heard this, I haven’t experienced this, but I’ve heard in the midwest they used to have blizzards where you couldn’t back in the day when you needed to walk to the barn and milk the cows that you could get lost on the way back to the house because the blizzard was so, so, um, so cover, you know, covering or uh severe maybe. Okay, great. So you needed a rope between the two buildings And sometimes I feel like as a coach, I’m the one that’s either the rope or I’m able to connect between calls say, hey, but remember just three calls ago, you you already talked about that and this is what you’re gonna do. Oh, that’s right. I forget, I forgot I did that. That’s super okay. And just kind of get pointing the way pointing some of the rocks on the path for people to take. And that’s that’s incredibly uh life giving. For sure,

[00:42:11.70] spk_0:
blinding, blinding. The blizzard was blinding. Thank you. That’s what we wanted. Uh We’re both 50 plus are blinding. Yes, that’s what you want. Um Yeah, right. I said you’re you’re the you’re the red back. That’s I like that quite a metaphor. Good one.

[00:43:12.90] spk_1:
And it’s because yeah, the demands of life can really be blinding to this. That uh people were there. So the Center for Creative Leadership tried to figure out like the one thing was for business leaders that would be the most stressful. And it turns out there are four. And they’re all as when somebody else pointed out to me, there are people, peers, colleagues, customers and supervisors or bosses. Uh, and the nonprofits, it’s often boards, donors, staff and, and uh, and the clients, those are all pulling people apart. So it’s really easy to lose our way and to have somebody that’s, that’s sole job. Is there to be there to help you be better? Um, that I became a coach because in my experience, I grew more through talking to coaches, uh, than I did, consultants are great. They have a, they have a blueprint that they were hired them to to put onto the organization. But talking to a coach that didn’t even know my work, helped me to grow as an individual and I could figure out how to do be a better individual in my job when I understood a little bit more about myself

[00:43:15.80] spk_0:
and I love you also have the voice so well

[00:43:18.71] spk_1:
there we go because it is mostly by phones.

[00:44:29.99] spk_0:
Yeah, you were destined. It’s time for a break. Send in blue. It’s an all in one digital marketing platform with tools to help build end, end digital campaigns that look professional are affordable and keep you organized. They do digital campaign marketing. Most marketing software designed for big companies has the enterprise level price tag, not so sending blue priced for nonprofits, it’s an easy to use marketing platform that walks you through the steps of building a campaign. You want to try out to send him blue and get the free month, go to the listener landing page at tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant in blue. We’ve got boo koo but loads more time for the surprising gift of doubt some more. A little more about stories made a little bit. But you talk about the future eulogy, this is this is other stories that other people would say would tell about you. How do you, you know, influence your future history and talk about the future eulogy and that kind of storytelling.

[00:46:50.88] spk_1:
Sure, Well and stories because our phones may have an android or IOS operating system, some people may sell blackberry, I don’t know, but are as human beings. It’s uh, story is our operating system and one of the ways we can program that is by figuring out what’s the story we want to be living uh, for me and for many people because if you google your eulogy, you’ll find this as a coaching practice that’s been well used is too think about at your funeral, what will people say about you is what will your closest people, maybe your family, uh community members, colleagues, what are they gonna say? Um and some of us that’s a little bit too hypothetical. So it’s uh the other way to look at it is if you were to die today, what would they say about you today? And writing it down, even in bullet points doesn’t have to be complete sentences. Can bring some clarity to how they perceive you or how you think you’re being perceived versus how you want to be. Had one leader that was we before the pandemic had quadrant three leadership days where we do, people would fly into Greenville and we’d hold the whole day and we’d kind of work together as a group through some of these exercises and when the uh um, the kind of the story that she wanted for her department and she realized, terrified that her stuff never know that she wanted it to be a joyful place because she was so focused on policies and procedures and tightening, you know, routines that had been really lax and not non existent. Um, but she said now I have an opportunity to live into this story that I’ve written. And it was sort of like for her, it was a history of the future, It wasn’t a eulogy, but thinking about that kind of final beginning with the end in mind, franklin Covey’s habit too can be very helpful for us. Uh my example was when I did this in my twenties, I realized I want my kids to know I love them, but going away to work didn’t necessarily communicate that love. So it allowed me to be, I wasn’t gonna stop going away to work because that providing for my family was something that was pretty important to me. But I was able to then figure out what are other ways that we can, I can communicate that love so that they know that I love them despite my going away.

[00:46:53.48] spk_0:
Just buy them things when you go away. Sense

[00:46:55.54] spk_1:
that could definitely be part of it. Yeah. Until my wife said palpable items, No more stuffed animals. I used to get one and every place I was going and she’s like that’s enough. They have enough stuffed animals.

[00:47:13.48] spk_0:
I would just, I just reduce it to the tangible goods. Just send, just send presents. We know love is equivalent to tangible tangible items. The more

[00:47:16.53] spk_1:
and the shot glasses in the airport stores were a little bit confusing to kids like why are this is a doll cup? What is this? Shot

[00:47:23.00] spk_0:
glasses? Yeah, I heart new york shot glasses. Right. Just send things, sending things that’s equivalent to love if you’re going to be away, replace yourself with items with items gift.

[00:47:35.71] spk_1:
Yeah,

[00:47:41.78] spk_0:
I thought that was very interesting. The future eulogy. Uh

[00:47:42.55] spk_1:
have you ever done an exercise like that?

[00:47:47.28] spk_0:
No, no, I haven’t. Or or what even even making it simpler what folks would say about you now?

[00:47:54.68] spk_1:
Yeah, it’s very clarifying and a little chilling for some

[00:48:41.67] spk_0:
people. Uh huh. Let’s talk a little bit. Uh so just the listeners know, see we’re bouncing around on different things that that I think are interesting because you know, you we can’t really do the self assessments that are that are part of Mark’s book. You just gotta you gotta get the damn book surprising gift of doubt. Mark eh Pittman, you gotta get the book to do the self assessments to move yourself from the quadrant to you may be stuck in or to move yourself from whatever quadrant urine to advance your current leadership effectiveness or your future leadership. We’re all potentially future leaders, even those of us who don’t work in an organization. We’re still leading. I lied. I lied folks. Absolutely. I just they’re not on my payroll, but they were not an organization payroll that I that I am leading, but I’m leading them. So leadership still applies even if you’re an entrepreneur solo preneurs, however you want to call yourself.

[00:49:02.57] spk_1:
Well, I’m really glad you said that because I think a lot of people think leaders, uh, is a title which that is a form of leadership. Like you’re saying it’s influencing others and as human beings, we’re always influencing other people and that is a form of leadership. And so I try to take the broadest view. Absolutely,

[00:50:05.86] spk_0:
and I find it, you know, all right, my synesthesia is kicked in. I just got a chill, because I’m thinking about times when I’ve been able to influence someone, I’m not gonna can’t divulge any details, but influence someone through a way of thinking that I’m that I’m that I saw that they didn’t and I’ve moved there, you can move people thinking, and it’s not it’s not conniving or anything, it’s just it’s moving, it’s just consensus building. But so and I’m not saying I’m successful at every time, you know? But when you when you when you’re successful at helping people see things in a different way, you know, whether it’s, I don’t know, uh it’s a concept or it’s money, or it’s a it’s a path forward to in a relationship to bring it to fundraising. Um, it’s very, very gratifying, I mean, it’s giving the Children a couple of instances where, where it’s happened. So that’s all to me. That’s all leadership.

[00:50:09.06] spk_1:
Yes, absolutely. I firmly agree. Yes.

[00:50:37.76] spk_0:
Okay. Otherwise we’re shutting you off 46 minutes, that’s the end. That’s the end of the show. I figured you would, of course. Um, so, you know, we’re moving around to different things that we can help you help you understand the self assessments, help you move your leadership forward. And another one that Mark talks about in the book is is goal setting, different types of goals. Very important goal setting. Yes. Well,

[00:51:15.56] spk_1:
So one of the things that we do with, there’s a lot of books written on goal setting. So this was the third of the three major areas that I focused on. But what I did was I took about 18 years ago, 17 years ago, I took all the different goal setting things. Not only did I study as a kid growing up in my family, but I also have a program in college that actually required me to get a lower grade because I was supposed to take leadership and learned goal setting as an extracurricular, not just as part of my course of study, but I also my masters in organizational leadership. So I’ve had these all sorts of formal education on goal setting as well. As you just

[00:51:18.36] spk_0:
said something of course required you to get a lower grade. What?

[00:51:49.76] spk_1:
Yeah, there was a there was a scholarship at the Underground college I went to that required me to get, I had a lower not required. I shouldn’t say that that there was a lower great expectation because there was an expectation that you’re gonna be all in on the leadership in student activities. And part of that was having a mentor with the staff member and having regular meetings with them, teaching you goal setting and teaching you how to do mission statements and how to create strategic plans and that sort of thing. And that was all sort of extra curricular.

[00:51:53.54] spk_0:
You got to higher grade. Is that what happened?

[00:51:55.78] spk_1:
No no no. Unfortunately they let my high grade still stands okay. But there are other some of my other friends who had a different scholarship had to keep a higher G. P. A. I didn’t have the pressure of having to keep it G. P. A. To keep the scholarship I had.

[00:52:09.75] spk_0:
So. Okay. Yeah. Alright so goal setting

[00:52:45.85] spk_1:
anyway so so what I did was I tried to take a bunch of the parts that I didn’t realize I was doing quadrant three work at the time, but I tried to take a bunch of different parts that I liked and this, this system that I use, um, I submit to, it’s in the book. I used my clients. Uh, it isn’t the end all be all, but it’s a good one To try. The first step you do is write a list of 100 things to accomplish in the next year or in your life. Um, it’s, uh, and why 100 for me is because it forces you to get silly and it forces you to think creatively because at some point you’re just trying to fill lions. Um, What most people that I’ve done this with, they get 10 pretty quickly because it’s job-related. Probably things that are going to be on the performance review, 10

[00:52:53.25] spk_0:
goals in a lifetime or even in a year. Yeah, I

[00:55:13.74] spk_1:
Know. But then the next 10 become really hard. And when we were doing these uh intensive zero in Greenville, people would call me over to the table said, Mark, can I, huh? This, can I put this this goal on my list? It’s like plenty of garden. I want to plant a garden. Can I put that on my list? Check? Of course. Again, it’s your list and that’s the point. Um, it gets the personal and the professional together. And what I have found with so many leaders is that they get so fragmented in their life. They have the professional side, they have their family side. They have different sides that when they’re looking at their goals comprehensively and they’re listening at 100 forces you to do that in some way. Um it, the amount of um centering that, that brings to human beings, the energy in the room invariably goes up because people see themselves their full selves represented there. And it’s not like you’re gonna necessarily share your board or your boss that you’re doing a garden goal, but it’s your life. So you get to set the goals for that you want to have. Um, So the first step is that is writing the 100. The second step is then the history of the future, which is you read through all of them and it will take days usually to do the 100 read through the read through them and then just project forward. What does it look like? 12 months from now? If you’ve accomplished everything on that list, even the most far out crazy ones, what are people saying about you, what awards you have, what degrees you have? What, how are you feeling about yourself and then let that sit. Um, If you did nothing else, you’d be shocked in 12 months. How many of those things you get accomplished? I’ve tested this with groups and it’s fascinating. But then you then you can map them out, you go back over the list and um, look for two different types of goals. Either the ones that make sense, like planting a garden that if you’ve also to fill in 100 lines, you also to plant carrots, plant cabbage, playing potatoes, planting a garden well kind of scoop up a bunch of those others, other goals, the smaller goals in it. So you could use that one type of magnet goal, the other ones or something that just kind of pop off the page or you kind of get a little kind of jolts of joy. There’s, there’s, it’s not really rational why some of those are there. But paying attention to those and and trying to call the list down to about 3-5 of the rational goals in the irrational goals. Um, and then plotting those out and focusing on those. Um, some people get it done in a quarter. I usually have to take the full year for each of those goals, but

[00:55:25.74] spk_0:
and one of your bookshelves behind you, you have a license plate that says gold guy. And

[00:55:29.82] spk_1:
that’s because of this process to

[00:55:31.58] spk_0:
basketball again.

[00:56:24.93] spk_1:
No, it’s not. It was my, my first ever training was with equine vet. And my second training was because of his referral was with physical therapy practice who was but they were owned by physicians and they wanted to prove that they needed an admin help To do the building so they could keep doing more care of patients. So we set up, we broke down their goals over the course of a year, what their revenue had to be with, how they were going to communicate it to the people that are on the practice, all the different things. 12 months of them we worked also how they can operate, operationalize their their strength. So the people, what did people like doing, what they like doing? They’ve never asked them, they just did the work that was in front of them. They found that one person who loves knees, somebody else loved ankles and they started shifting the workloads. They could do better at a higher quality. Um Within four months of that training they’d hit their annual goals With the 12-month goals they had accomplished in four months. And so I saw this uh Pippi, I saw her at a store and she said that’s the goal guy, that’s the guy I was telling you about pointing at me. So I got a license plate. This big old guy. That

[00:56:46.13] spk_0:
was pretty cool. The equine veterinary practice. You could have been the full guy. Hey, that’s cons are always the worst unless you think of them first.

[00:56:49.93] spk_1:
Alright. Getting a in there, but it wasn’t working.

[00:57:03.93] spk_0:
All right. All right. Mark, leave us with some some market. Pittman, surprising gift of doubt wisdom. And uh and and we’ll leave it there please. Yeah.

[00:58:04.02] spk_1:
Well, thanks so much for having me on the show. And one of the things that I think is really important. But there’s two things I’d like to end with. One is is that we’ve hinted that assessments if you’re doing assessments as part of your team work, part of your own personal growth. I love them. Don’t let them confine you, they’re not they’re meant to help you grow in grace and understanding of other people. Not to slap labels on people and pigeonholed them. So I’ll just, that’s one thing that’s a big, big acts. I like to grind. But I think going forward just people leaving, you know, listening this. Um, as you work through the whatever the days are ahead of you and you find yourself asking, you know, criticizing yourself being really hard on yourself. Try to pause and just say, well, what if this is exactly the gift that I have for the sector? What if what if this limitation is actually the strength and the unique bend that I give because I feel like when you’re, I feel like you’re broken, you may be, but you could be on the verge of greatness.

[00:58:24.42] spk_0:
The gold guy. The book is the surprising gift of doubt. Use uncertainty to become the exceptional leader. You are meant to be get the book, do the assessments, don’t let them pigeonholed you, Mark Bittman, you’ll find him and his company at concord leadership group dot com and he’s at Mark eh Pittman, Thank you again. Mark Real pleasure.

[00:58:36.22] spk_1:
Thank you

[00:59:06.22] spk_0:
next week, heather burr right with performance improvement. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o. And by sending blue the only all in one digital marketing platform empowering non profits to grow. tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant send in Blue.

[00:59:26.82] spk_2:
Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff shows social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by scott Stein, thank you for that information scotty you with me next week for nonprofit radio Big non profit ideas for the Other 95%. Go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for March 1, 2021: Leadership For Strategic Execution

My Guest:

Joe Pajer: Leadership For Strategic Execution

.

There’s lots of talk about strategic planning. Lots of time and money devoted to ambitious plans—which often sit on a shelf. It takes leadership to drive strategic execution. What does that leadership look like? Joe Pajer walks us through, with his experience from the corporate sector.

 

 

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Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio.
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[00:01:56.64] spk_1:
Yeah. Hello and welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio. Big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d bear the pain of a chroma top CIA if I saw that you missed this week’s show Leadership for Strategic Execution. There’s lots of talk about strategic planning, lots of time and money devoted to ambitious plans, which often sit on a shelf. It takes leadership to drive strategic execution. What does that leadership look like? Joe Pager walks us through with his experience from the corporate sector. Antonis. Take two podcast pleasantries. We’re sponsored by turn to communications, PR and content for nonprofits, your story is their mission. Turn hyphen two dot c o. It’s my pleasure to welcome Joe pager to nonprofit radio. He retired from the corporate CEO office. He grew revenues, profits, customers and employees at three companies for private equity investors. He’s been on the boards of the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and in Pittsburgh, it’s Carnegie, not Carnegie. Now he’s a board member for the ST James School in Hagerstown, Maryland, and the Trinity School for ministry in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was my fraternity pledge trainer at Pi Kappa Alpha at Carnegie Mellon University. Back then, he was zip. You’ll find him on LinkedIn. He’s retired in a board member. Doesn’t need to be anywhere else. Welcome to nonprofit radio zip.

[00:02:01.24] spk_0:
Thanks, tony. Good to have you. Real pleasure. Thank you. Glad to be here. I’m

[00:02:05.74] spk_1:
glad. Tell us. Tell me about this private equity investment firm work. What does that look like?

[00:03:22.24] spk_0:
Sure, that came in the latter half of my career. Before that, I was an executive at larger companies. But you know what private equity is all about? There’s many different models, but the particular group of investors I worked for, um, they by businesses and they grow them, and then they sell right. So, um, typically, we buy it from a founder, right? Someone who founded the business, he was ready to retire and would like to make some money off of the business. And they usually their businesses that these were technology businesses that that we could see tremendous upside to. Right. So we do a lot of searching for those with tremendous upside. You know, founders are good guys, but they often our unit dimensional. So we could add things like professional sales or new strategies, etcetera and or maybe even combine them with other companies and grow them. So that’s what I did for the last 12 to 15 years. Is, um, three different companies sequentially, We bought them. We grew them, as you said in terms of revenue customers, number of people. Um, and then we sold them to larger companies for a nice profit. And it’s very fun, Very fun. You got to walk in every couple of years to a brand new business, try to figure out the market in the business and figure out how to grow it.

[00:03:29.24] spk_1:
So were there, uh, potentials to make money that you’re not sharing with your with your friend tony-martignetti at the time? Was there like insider information? You could have. You could have snuck to me. Was there a way for me to make some money off these three?

[00:03:53.44] spk_0:
All of the information is inside because they’re private companies. So there’s no there’s no public listing of the companies that are strictly privately held, their owned entirely by the investors. So yeah, there was no opportunity for you to make money unless you’d come and work for us. In which case, then, Yeah, you could have made some money.

[00:04:51.44] spk_1:
Okay, We’re going to find out what that would look like if I had, indeed been working with you. Um all right, so you’ve got some You got some ideas. And, you know, we’ve shared some concerns about, uh, as I said in the intro Strategic plans. Lots of resources going to ambitious. Uh, maybe grandiose plans will just will be kind and say ambitious, but execution, Uh, I think. And you’ve you’ve heard stories, and I think you’ve seen some, too. Um, and even in the corporate sector, um, not not not executed. Just kind of sitting around and not really seeing the change that was envisioned by the by the ambitious plan. So I’m guessing, you know, I mean, we should start with, like, vision and goals, and right before we were gonna have a We got a vision to this before we can start to do the execution part.

[00:08:10.14] spk_0:
That’s right. That’s right. Listen, we’ve all we’ve all seen organizations, companies, nonprofits, maybe our own households. Who knows that, uh, well laid plans that never happened, right? They just never happened. Um, and you know, I learned this early in my career. I was once asked by a nine year old hockey player that I was coaching. He said, Coach winded. When did you decide that you wanted to be our CEO? And I thought about it for a few minutes, and I said might have been the first business meeting I ever sat in because I knew what we were talking about wasn’t gonna get done. It drove me out of my mind. Right? So, look, we’ve all been there. It starts, though. Obviously it starts with having a good plan, a plan that you believe in before you ever get to the execution part. So, you know, just real briefly, I’m sure you have plenty of shows on how to build a strategy and a plan, and there’s plenty of people out there doing that. Are we have, yes, but a couple of criteria. One you ought to be able to answer for me really quickly. What you want that business, what you want your organization to look like three years from now, and you ought to be able to do that in three bullet points. I’ll give you five if you go to seven. The last two better be really interesting. 85. So you know you have that vision and that’s a vision. All right. You know you can have visions that are this. That the other thing? No, no. Just tell me if I show up three years from now. What’s going to be different about this place, right? And look, that’s not easy. You got to think about it. You’ve got to work hard on it. It’s another job, necessarily just for the CEO. It’s also a job for the board in a non profit. They need to share that vision responsibility and then then below that. Okay, that’s the vision. That’s what we’re going to look like at three years from now. What are the 5 to 7 things we need to do? Those are the strategic initiatives. Alright. Now here the board has less of a role in my opinion, and the CEO or the director in a non profit has a very large piece here. All right. They need to know their organization where they need to take it. Um, and then a 3rd 3rd point, you know. So if you can if you can clearly show me that Hey, we’re going to do this and that’s going to lead us to that. Well, then you’ve got a good strategy, or at least a good strategic plan. There’s another piece to it, too, though, which is, and this is the tricky question that sometimes people trip up on. Tell me what you’re not going to do. Tell me what people around here have been saying we ought to do, and you’ve decided I’m not doing that. All right, We’re not going down that path. So if you don’t do that, you’re going to run into problems with resource allocation and focus and people’s commitment and engagement. So a really good strategy will tell you what you’re not going to do. All right, so, you know, that’s all I’ll say about strategic planning right now Is the output of that has to has to fit those three criteria,

[00:08:35.24] spk_1:
you emphasis believing in the plan because because later on we’re gonna talk about allocating resources around the plan to the plan taking resources away from those things were not going to do anymore and putting them towards what we are going to do. So if you’re going to do that with confidence, you’ve got to believe in where you’re headed.

[00:09:42.54] spk_0:
Let me touch on that really quickly. It’s a great point. I hear from people we don’t have the money to invest in this. Well, that either means that your plan is garbage. All right, that it doesn’t really work mathematically. So you haven’t really worked hard enough on your plan. I got an idea, right? I got an idea. And if we go do it will grow our organization in this way. All right. Well, if you grow your organization in that way, you’ll have the money to fund, you know? So either you don’t believe that’s actually going to happen, right? Or you don’t actually buy into the idea. So you know, when you come when somebody comes back to me and says we don’t have enough money to do this initiative, right? And you thought This is where I want to be in three years? This is critical to doing it. I’ve done the math. If I invest in it, it will happen. And it will benefit the organization if you come back so we don’t have the money to do it. I’m just saying you don’t understand the plan or you don’t buy into it one or the other. Right now, it could be that the plan is wrong. In which case, sharpen your pencil, Go back to work.

[00:09:48.34] spk_1:
Maybe you have something to talk about, but right, it’s either a belief in the plan or or you or you believe in the plan or you or you or you don’t.

[00:10:06.94] spk_0:
Yeah, you’re either resisting it or yeah, but the plan says that will accomplish. That’s the key. The plan says it will accomplish your goal. So how can you not find the investment? To do that, you must write, all right, or you haven’t worked out. Point

[00:10:35.94] spk_1:
is either got the wrong plan or you don’t believe in what you the plan that you have. Okay, what about the board? You mentioned the board’s role in the vision, but not so much in the the, uh, tactics are going to use to get there. What about the interfering board, or or even board member or a couple of members? Maybe it’s not the full board, but a lot of times it doesn’t matter. What about those? Those interloping interfering board members who do get involved in the tactics, the methods we’re gonna we’re gonna use to execute.

[00:10:40.14] spk_0:
Yeah. So, um, for the record, very clearly, I’ve been on four very good boards for perfect

[00:10:46.11] spk_1:
boards. And

[00:12:24.54] spk_0:
we don’t have this. We don’t have that issue anywhere. Um, look aboard. Um, a board of trustees for a school or a private private education institutions. They are responsible for preserving the vision and the values defining the vision and the values of that school. That’s what they’re there for, right? Um, they’re responsible for hiring the person to get them to that vision. Um, that person needs to create the strategy with a lot of good input from the board, but it’s their responsibility. Whoever that leader is of the organization. CEO, headmaster, director, whatever their title, um, they’re responsible for that. That’s their job. That’s what you should have hired. Alright, if somebody, because the board will never have the day to day feel for the business that that person does, right, because they only meet quarterly. Um, So if you have an interfering board member, I would argue that you have a governance problem and a strategic problem. Um, not necessarily a person problem, although it may well be a person problem as well. And I’d recommend that you go by any number of good books of how to set up good boards and go fix your board. Right? All right, you cannot. Now listen. There’s people who can help, right? There’s people with contacts. There’s people with experience. There’s an absolutely, you know, tap into them. But ultimately, the head of that organization is responsible for running that organization.

[00:12:29.35] spk_1:
It’s got to be the CEO

[00:12:31.17] spk_0:
got to be. Yeah,

[00:12:53.04] spk_1:
all right. You got some, uh, sort of steps or, you know, some. Yeah, a pathway. The pathway to, uh, to strategic execution and not surprising. Uh, lots of folks say this. We’re starting with what we’re gonna measure. Yeah, metrics. What’s your what’s your What’s your advice around here?

[00:13:10.64] spk_0:
So, a couple of things, um, let me start. Let me let me back up just a half a step and talk about something that’s, uh, near and dear to my heart called. Um, I’m stealing this from I was trained as a Baldridge examiner. That term probably doesn’t mean many too many things to people.

[00:13:16.86] spk_1:
We got jargon jail on nonprofit radio. Yeah. Just committed an offense. Baldridge Examiner

[00:13:48.34] spk_0:
folks that are younger than you and I would never would never even have heard of it. But it’s an old quality thing, Sort of like Six Sigma. And the idea was, it was run by the U. S. Federal government was quite a good program, and there was a set of criteria for a business. And you would examine the business against these criteria. And you could potentially win a Baldridge Award, which was a very big deal. Um, companies like Motorola paved. Malcolm

[00:13:52.14] spk_1:
Malcolm. Malcolm Baldrige.

[00:14:04.54] spk_0:
Absolutely. Malcolm was the cabinet with the secretary of Commerce under Ronald Reagan. Believe he died in a horse accident. Um, and they named this thing after all. Right, So

[00:14:07.51] spk_1:
Congress, A bizarre polo accident.

[00:16:09.14] spk_0:
Yeah. No, it was more like Western rodeo stuff. He was a tough guy. So civilized. The horse was tougher in any case, so it’s named after him. He was part of the driving force, and and his death actually helped get passed in any case. Long story. They had this method of when you examine a business you find out, right? Do they have a plan? Right. What result is it that they’re trying to improve? Let’s say they’re trying to improve market share, right? Do they have a plan to improve market share? Right. And you say Look at their plans. They have to produce one. And if they had a plan, they would get sort of a 10% of the total score. Right? Um and then you would look at how do you measure it? And they look at the result. And if you were measuring the result, you might get another 20% mhm. But 70% of the score on that was associated with proved to me you’re actually executing the plan. Show me that you’ve actually done it. All right, because so many people will use the sporting analogy here. So many so many companies and so many organizations have the plan, and they look at the results. And if the results go bad, they go. The plan was wrong. They never checked to see whether they actually implemented the plan correctly. So, you know, sporting analogy, a team goes out, hockey team goes out to play on the ice. Um and and the coaches say This is the system we’re going to use and they go out and they lose the game. And of course, winning or losing was the metric and come back in and say we lost. We’re changing our system. No one would ever do that. They go, let’s look at the video and see whether we actually use the system. Right? And this is a big This is a big thing that happens. Um, in businesses and other organizations, that middle step is what I call strategic execution. And I’m telling you, it is it is more rare than you think. Right?

[00:16:11.14] spk_1:
And you’ve seen this on the corporate side as well. This is absolutely for some revolution revelation that you’ve only seen on the on the not for profit side. Yeah,

[00:16:19.64] spk_0:
over and over again. The execution

[00:16:29.34] spk_1:
all right. And that, you know, we were talking earlier, and you’ve made the point that, um that leads a lot. A lot of CEOs to create reorganization

[00:16:33.93] spk_0:
so

[00:16:35.29] spk_1:
that they can They can say they’ve done something. I mean, they’re linked in profile is now more robust. They reorganized around something.

[00:17:12.04] spk_0:
Yeah, You see it a lot I don’t mean to bash large companies, but because large companies are much more difficult beasts, right. But very large companies do this all the time. They say that their strategy is to reorganize them. And yes, it makes them feel good because they can check off a box that they indeed reorganized. They laid off some people here. They put somebody new in charge here. They restructured, etcetera, etcetera. Um, I don’t want to be too negative, but golly, I don’t know what that gets done, and I work.

[00:17:14.41] spk_1:
There’s a lot of wasted, a lot of wasted reorganization

[00:18:28.84] spk_0:
and the issues, the things that need to be changed, the things that need to be executed, no pun intended right are or what you’re doing right. And where you’re focused, right? It’s not who’s leading it. And I mean it is who’s leading it, but it’s not entirely who’s leading it, and it’s yeah, so it’s just to avoid Listen, all of this is hard to work, right? Um, the reason the reason I did it was because if I did and I’d lose my job, these investors, you know, they weren’t interested in people who weren’t actually growing the company, right? I mean, you could have as many board meetings where you said all the right things and pretty slides as you wanted. If the company wasn’t growing, it wasn’t your job anymore, right? And by the way, very, very few people in my position work for the same investors twice. They usually do one, and then they find a different set. And I’m the only person who’s worked for this set of investors three times, okay, on three different companies. So it’s all about finding that thing that has to happen to grow the company and then making sure it gets executed. That’s why I have sort of a particular affinity or sensitivity to this issue.

[00:19:12.14] spk_1:
But so much of this is moving people. You know, people people don’t like change. I don’t care how much they’re paid. They’re still human beings. I don’t care how long they’ve been there, you know? Of course, the longer the maybe the more difficult to change. But, you know, people are resistant to change. You talk about the family, you know, people don’t like to move. People don’t like to change jobs. People don’t like change within their jobs. People don’t like to have to go to a different supermarket in the middle of a pandemic. People don’t like not being able to go out and have dinner with friends in a pandemic. People don’t like change, but so much of what we’re talking about is driving change. Yeah, you’re driving change in a company that’s driving change among a bunch of people.

[00:19:17.14] spk_0:
That’s

[00:19:32.44] spk_1:
what the company is made of. It’s, uh, it’s it’s got, It’s got assets, got hard assets, It’s got people. The the Howard assets are easy to move around. You can ship those, you can sell these, you can acquire some. But moving the freaking people, that’s that’s what we’re talking about. Moving people to change that they don’t like

[00:19:59.14] spk_0:
it is. And I would imagine that it’s more difficult in the nonprofit sector than it is in the corporate sector. And the reason I would say that is because in the corporate sector there is a big forcing function called competition right and investors, and you have to make the numbers, so if you don’t change, you know, you go away quickly and and so let me let me talk a little bit. Then about about what I see about how you do strategic execution. Because it is exactly that. It’s about changing the people.

[00:21:03.94] spk_1:
It’s time for a break turn to communications. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times You want to be in papers like that? What about CBS Market Watch? The Chronicle of Philanthropy turn to has the relationships with these outlets and lots of others like them. They’re known in the industry so that when the outlets are looking for experts on charitable giving or non profit trends or philanthropy, they call turn to turn to calls. You. You know that because you’re their client, they’re going to call you. They can help you get the exposure. The media that you’re looking for relationships, right? It’s all about leveraging relationships. They’ve got them. Turn hyphen two dot c O. Now back to leadership for strategic execution. All right? Yeah, because, yeah, I’m gonna I’m gonna rant here about

[00:21:09.41] spk_0:
change

[00:21:19.44] spk_1:
before we get to metrics and resources. You know, you got to move people. You got to motivate people positively or negatively, I suppose. But you got to move people and you get people to do things that they don’t want to do.

[00:22:38.34] spk_0:
I used to tell this story really, in big, big, setting, small settings everywhere. I said, You know, you get on the airplane, you read in the airplane magazine and they’re interviewing some executive and a question answered thing and you’re going through it. And at some point they go, What’s the secret? And the executive goes, It’s all about the people and you go, Oh, crap. Like everybody gives that answer really again. And then I thought about it for a while, and I’m like, Gosh, it really is all about the people. It’s right. It’s a boring answer and it is the answer. Listen, here’s how you get people to change. Yeah, One of the things I loved about my career was I would walk into a company that had not accomplished something for a long time, and they had many things in front of them that they could accomplish, and we would go accomplish it and people would go. How did that happen? And they feel good about it, and they’d have a I used to say, I want to give them a story to tell their grandkids when they’re sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch. Right about business. Most people go through their business careers going. Yeah, there’s that over there. And then all the stuff I like over here. And I want to have something they like from their job. So, look, how do you change? How do you get people

[00:22:55.14] spk_1:
before the first? Okay. Before the first milestone, right before the first home run. This company has now achieved something that it could have achieved 10 years earlier. But, you know, there’s a bit of a founder syndrome, and they were unit dimensional, as you said. And so how

[00:22:55.34] spk_0:
do you get them bought in

[00:22:56.38] spk_1:
before that first home run? How do you get some momentum going And you get interest?

[00:23:30.84] spk_0:
Exactly. So look, um, what do you say? Well, what you do is this. First you got to find that strategy that’s all important. And you got to find the planets, and then you must communicate very clearly. Okay, You must communicate. And look, there’s some pieces to that communication. First of all, I heard a long time ago and always strive to do this. You should speak at an eighth grade level. Okay? You have to understand How can

[00:23:32.74] spk_1:
do a bunch of engineers at a tech company M B A s your CFO?

[00:23:55.24] spk_0:
Yeah. Your operations team who are hourly workers. Right. Um, so you’ve got a range. You’ve got a range in there. Speak at the eighth grade club. Secondly, make sure what you’re saying is a story. All right? I’ll go back to coaching little kids in hockey. I could go up

[00:24:20.74] spk_1:
hockey. It’s about your your affinity for hockey’s obviously coming out. Yes, I want I want you to know, uh, for for listeners because you won’t be able to see video. This is the sound of this. That’s me, uh, flipping pages through my pi Kappa Alpha Pledge book. So there’s there’s lots of there’s lots of history in these pages. Joseph Steven, pager from Meriden, Connecticut.

[00:24:23.68] spk_0:
There you go.

[00:24:24.74] spk_1:
Uh, and hockey is. Hockey is prominent on your page,

[00:24:28.21] spk_0:
and it remains. This would

[00:24:30.22] spk_1:
be from 1980. I still have this from 1980

[00:25:59.04] spk_0:
throughout my career. Uh, but here’s Here’s the deal. I can sit in front of a group of 15 year olds, and I could show them all the exes and ohs on the whiteboard and say This is what we’re gonna do today. That’s what we’re gonna do today. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they’d all be fidgeting and not paying attention. Or, like 15 year olds do. They’ll be staring at the floor, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then But if I if I came in and said, Let me tell you about a game I played in college and what happened? Their eyes are beyond me. They’d be lifted up from the floor. We respond to stories, Okay? People learn from stories. They don’t learn from textbooks, right? They learn from stories. This is what you must do as a leader. You must tell the future story. Okay? You must say, here are the great things were going to do for our community in our space. Here’s what we’re doing today. Here’s how that’s going to change and be even better three years from now. Yeah. How are we going to get there? We’re going to do these three things, okay? It’s going to feel a little different to you, but we’re going to do these three things. And do you know how many people are going to buy into that? the first time you tell them. Two. There’s if there’s 50 people in the room. Three

[00:26:03.21] spk_1:
allies you’ve got to allies you can leverage.

[00:29:09.74] spk_0:
So what do you got to do? You’ve got to tell them that same story over and over again and person by person as they ask questions. And your job is over the next 6 to 9 months to reduce it to the impact on them as an individual and how they can contribute and how they can be a piece of a piece of it. This communication aspect is very important. What I see, what I see executives do is they think, what I said that last time. I’m going to change it this time. No, no, you don’t understand. Just because they heard it once from your lips, they don’t believe it, and they probably don’t remember it. You’ve got to keep saying you got to keep saying it. Then of course, you’ve got to lead by example. Right now, you’re in a position this will go back sort of into metrics and resource allocation. You’re in a position to make a bunch of decisions and to make them in front of everybody. They have to be consistent with that vision you’re describing. So you might decide to move resources from a status quo kind of a project to the new project, and you would explain it that way. Even if they’re upset, you might decide to set certain metrics and review those metrics on a monthly or quarterly basis. Really, the metrics that you set and everybody knows there’s a billion metrics for everything. You got to pick the two or three that make a difference to your strategy and just work on those If somebody wants to know some other thing, here’s an example. Software company, last software company, Iran. We would sell the software. Then we would install it for the customer and run it for them. We call that activating it, and then we would, um, run it for them. And if they were satisfied all the time, we would make a lot of money because they would never leave us, right? So the sale part we call booking the middle part we call activating the third part we call just satisfying. And I just reduced it to that. We only have one mission here. Book activates, satisfied all of you are involved in one of those three. Okay, Now, let’s talk about how you’re involved and what you can do and get the managers in. They’re talking. This is 400 people. But that became, You know, that became our mantra. Book activates satisfied? Well, where’s gross margin in that? Where’s cost savings loses. Where is entering a new market? Well, we have stuff to do there, too. That’s it Was secondary to those three things. If you did those three things, you didn’t have to know what I used to say. If you do those three things, don’t you worry about profitability? Like a knife through butter will be profitable, I guarantee it. Right. And you don’t even need to see the profitability. So you got to make it simple. You gotta make it pity. You gotta make it catching. You’ve got to say it over and over and over again. And if you do that for six months of those 50 people in your organization, you’ll have 48 of them. And then there’s going to be too

[00:29:11.74] spk_1:
right. The recalcitrance.

[00:31:31.04] spk_0:
Yeah. They’re not going to go. You I need to go have a conversation. You need to do your job as a leader. And look, the conversations not mean the conversation is this. We’re a team. Everybody always says I’m all in. It’s all about team. Well, we’re a team. And now we’re gonna put our money where our mouth is, right? The team has decided to go in this direction. I understand that you’ve been here for a long time and that you did things a certain way and all that stuff. I get it, I get it and it’s all valid. And it was We’ve heard it, but we’ve decided as a team to go in another direction. I need you to come back and see me tomorrow. Come back tomorrow morning or tomorrow afternoon. Stop by my office. Just tell me, can you come with us? And if you can’t And let’s talk about how to how to separate our pads gracefully, right, it’s not a threat, you know, it’s but it is a it is necessary. You can’t have one guy on a professional sports team saying I don’t agree with the system. You just can’t. You’re never gonna win anything, right. And this is a very reasonable approach. I mean, and quite frankly, every time I’ve had this conversation, they’ve come the next morning and said, I’m in now. Some of them might have come and said, Well, I’m scared now. And so I’m in others. Might others, I think, really went home. And when? What am I doing? Why? Why am I so against this? Why can’t go along with it, right? And and they jump in and they become productive that afternoon. Right? Um, and in a couple of cases, they’ve come back and said, You know what? I really like the company that was here before you got here, Joe. And I’m not bought into this one. So how can How can we? How can I leave gracefully? Can I have a month to find? You know, you can absolutely just you say nice things about me. I’ll say nice things about you. Um, and let’s do it. So So that’s, uh, and by the way, it’s good. It’s too recalcitrance is what you call

[00:31:33.39] spk_1:
them. Yeah,

[00:31:44.14] spk_0:
they can be a huge issue, so if they exist, you must take action or you’re not going to get there because they will continue. Two needle.

[00:31:45.06] spk_1:
They’re like a cancer they’re they’re growing. They’re they’re trying to find their trying to grow their tribe right there, trying to grow their anti team.

[00:32:07.24] spk_0:
But you do it. You do it with complete and genuine respect. They have an opinion. You have an opinion. You don’t agree. There’s no reason to be, um, Washington. Ask with each other. I think I

[00:32:36.54] spk_1:
know you said gracefully, No, I mean, you’re professionals and you’re right. You don’t agree. You don’t agree on the future of the company that the team has that has a team has elected to pursue. There’s no point in, you know, there’s no point you’re hanging around your your unhappy. It’s going to hurt the team. That’s right. Let’s separate gracefully. I like gracefully. You don’t hear that in business to it gracefully. Let’s do it gracefully. Yeah, Joe, let me ask you, Do you have interest in helping nonprofits with all this leadership and strategic execution that we’re talking about?

[00:32:57.54] spk_0:
Sure, absolutely. If a nonprofit is interested in learning more about this, I can certainly help them on a consulting basis, help them get set up and help them get executing on their initiatives. I could even help them develop the initiatives, if that’s what they so desire. But yeah. No, I I very much would be interested in helping nonprofits achieve their results. Basically.

[00:33:04.04] spk_1:
Yeah. Okay. And so folks can get you on linked in

[00:33:07.34] spk_0:
Absolutely. Yeah. Just look me up on LinkedIn. Last name is spelled P a J e r.

[00:33:16.64] spk_1:
You, uh, you have a little story about sales compensation.

[00:33:19.44] spk_0:
It relates

[00:33:20.82] spk_1:
to relates to metrics. But before we before we move on from metrics where we, you know, we digress, But we’re moving around. This is good. This is excellent. This is not just good. This is excellent leadership advice. Uh, you got the sales comp story?

[00:36:18.83] spk_0:
Yeah. Yes. So one of the aspects of metrics of choosing the proper metrics is that, you know, you actually have to be able to measure the thing, right? So if you say I want to measure, I want to measure, um you know, let’s say I’m a food bank and I want to measure somebody’s improving nutrition as a result of my efforts. Well, that’s probably not measurable. Okay? I mean, maybe it is, but, you know, it’s probably difficult to track that person The individual that you gave the food to and and even more so I would question your statistics is whether you could actually correlate your effort to his improving nutrition if it improved. But that’s something that’s sort of undoable. There’s others, though, that you want to measure how many new people you reached through a program, and people say, Well, we don’t track that, So you can’t use that as a metric. Yeah, you know, So every company I’ve gone into the sales, the sales compensation plan, right? We believe that sales people are motivated by making more money. Yet many executives I know have no idea what they’re Salesforce’s, how they’re Salesforce’s compensation plan works. That’s crazy, right? So every company and of course, what we care about is growing. So, of course, it’s important to us to have the right sales compensation plant so that we can drive the growth. So every company I’ve gone in and redesigned the sales compensation plan, it’s actually something that I’ve gotten quite good at it, Um, you know, it’s it’s an area of expertise and I’ve done it pretty much myself, right. Um and every time finances told me we could never track this. We could never do this. We could never. This is just what we’ve never. And in two of the three cases I got up. After about an hour’s worth of discussion, I got up. I said, I hear everything you’re saying. You must make it happen. We’ll talk again when you have a plan to make it happen. Not before. Okay, basically, I said, do it right and you just have to because they’ll find a million reasons not to. Right? So So that is my sales compensation story. So, um, you have to sometimes sometimes you and sometimes in that conversation on metrics. By the way, what they’re really saying is it’s not automated. They’re saying it’s not automated. It’s

[00:36:22.41] spk_1:
gonna be hard for us to achieve it hard for us to measure it. Not impossible. It’s just it’s just hard.

[00:36:54.13] spk_0:
And this is another little thing that I’ve learned. Some of the people who work for me called these patriotism is, but, um, if you want to get something automated, make people do it manually. You know they’ll find a way to automated, and it has the benefit of automating it correctly, because if they start out with automation. They don’t really know what they want yet, right? They don’t know the ins and outs of what they’re doing, so yeah, Okay.

[00:36:55.53] spk_1:
You say the number one resource number one job of a chief executive is resource allocation. We

[00:37:03.09] spk_0:
were touching on this

[00:37:28.03] spk_1:
before moving things away from what you don’t want to be and into what you do want to be. What else? What else? You know, again, You’re moving people. Now, this is This is some of that change Some people are gonna be into, uh, you know, whatever different team, a different activity, a different way of doing their old activity. That’s more of the change. So, you know, we talked. We talked something about that. But what? What’s your advice around Moving resources around?

[00:39:22.02] spk_0:
Well, I think look, resource allocation is fundamentally getting the right people number one and the right number of people number two. And this can be very tricky, especially with new what I’ll call new growth initiatives to the company. So in all three companies, we expanded globally, right? So we didn’t have anybody, so we had to get the right people in each country a long way away. to to do this correctly. We needed the right number of people in each of those countries, so expanding globally is one way. But another way might be to expand in non profit terms. Expand your services right? Say, I don’t want to do just this. I can also do this while I have the client in front of me so I can do even more good for the client by expanding my services as well. Do you have anybody in your organization who understands that new service the way they need to? Right. And if not, you need to go outside the organization. Do you have the right number of people to expand that new service? Okay, do I have the right number of people offering the current service? Because there’s a you know, it’s a it’s a little bit of a hill, and then and then it flattens out after there’s a peak and then a flattened out thing. When you introduce something new, so you maybe you may have introduced a new service three years ago, and you may still be staffed at your peak, and you don’t need to be right. You could reallocate some of those resources, Um, to the new service. These are the key discussions. You have to have the big one for me. Did we We talked about believing in the plan?

[00:39:25.48] spk_1:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s wrapped up in that. If you’re going to move, Yeah. So resources around you got to believe in what you’re moving them toward,

[00:41:23.31] spk_0:
right? You just have to believe that that plan is going to work, right? And then you’ll be willing to commit, Um, you know, take, take another example. Um, this is a So you’re a nonprofit and you decide the development is critical to you. Okay, let’s say you’re a small educational facility, and you just gotta build the endowment, right? Or, you know, what’s happening to small private schools is going to happen to you. You’re not going to have the funds to build out the right buildings, etcetera. So you’ve got to build the endowment, and your three year plan is to add $10 million for the endowment, right? And look, you’ve had this development guy. He knows everybody, but it hasn’t really grown anything in years. Okay. All right. So you you decide. Okay. Well, maybe I move him someplace Maybe he’s going to retire. Maybe I just need a new development person, okay? And he’s got to go away. Fine. You go out to get the new development person and and you say, Well, I don’t want to spend more than $50,000 a year on this person, right? And somebody who’s 75,000 comes along right, but at a much higher skill set. No, I didn’t say 150,000, but 75,000? Well, you ought to do the work rather than just say that we’re all about saving money because we’re trying to help our clients. You ought to do the work to say, What would what would this guy get me that the other guy wouldn’t get? Me and I And how quickly will I get that $25,000 a year back, right? I mean, you know, it can’t always be about being the lowest cost provider of these services. You may well find that if if you hire and spend that extra 25,000, you’re going to grow your endowment by even more right and you’ll be able to provide even more dormitories or even better, etcetera. etcetera,

[00:41:42.91] spk_1:
and this goes back again, believing in the plan. And if, and as you said earlier, you said early on, if you don’t have the money for the plan, then then you haven’t thought through your plan adequately because you you picked an aspirational plan that you can’t afford to execute. And you can’t even do the fundraising to raise the extra money because it’s too astronomical. So you’ve got the wrong plan.

[00:42:43.70] spk_0:
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. You know where this comes up. A lot is in building buildings. It’s almost always the case that that, you know, you think a building costs less than what it’s going to cost. And it actually you think it will deliver less value than it actually delivers, right? Certain buildings. I mean, you know, if you’re building an administration building right but a new SportsCenter on a at a boarding school or a or a conference center at a place like the Trinity School for Ministry, these things these things are going to have much more impact and what you’re projecting, So think about them carefully and take the risk. I think the risk

[00:45:56.79] spk_1:
it’s time for Tony, take two podcast Pleasantries. You remember those? The podcast audience? Oh, my, uh, so loyal. Um, you’ve been If you’ve been listening for a while, you’ll remember that I used to do live listener love affiliate affections and podcast pleasantries. Well, the first of those two go away was the affiliate affections. When I ended the affiliate program, that was, uh, we had a family of, uh, about 15, maybe 20 am and FM stations throughout the country that we’re carrying non profit radio and there’s weekly schedules, but it wasn’t really scaling. And it constrained us in terms of how exactly minutes and seconds how long a show needed to be. So I ended that and the live audience, the live listener love. You know, that ended with the pandemic. I no longer go to the New York City studio no longer with Sam. Sam is still there at and y. You know, talk talk radio dot N y c. That’s him. That’s that’s that network talk radio dot N.Y.C.. It’s talking alternative, so Sam is still there. But I ended with him because of the pandemic. So of course, no more live listener love. And now working through Zoom and audacity. It’s the podcast audience. The pleasantries go out, you’re you’re the last remaining audience. When I If I cast you off, that’s the, uh, what do you call a podcast so that nobody listens to a guy talking to himself in a closet? A guy whispering to himself. Um, now So the pleasantries go out. The pleasantries remain. The podcast pleasantries. Whatever time you’re listening, however we fit. Whether you’re painting your house, doing the dishes, commuting, there’s less commuting going on. I realized that, but there’s still some commuting going on. Maybe you’re driving to, uh, you’re driving to the store. Who knows? However, non profit radio fits into your schedule. Maybe binge watching binge listening on Sundays. Who knows, However, it fits in. The pleasantries go out to you are loyal podcast audience still there over 13,000 each week. Pleasantries, pleasantries to you podcaster, podcast, listener pleasantries. And that is Tony’s Take two we’ve got but loads or boo coo. That’s what we’ve got. We’ve got Boo Koo, but loads more time for leadership for strategic execution with Joe pager and communications, you already said, speaking an eighth grade level. I guess this is another plagiarism about the number of times you should communicate and how many people are going to reach.

[00:46:32.58] spk_0:
Yeah. So, uh, yeah, if you want to reach people, communicate four times as much as you think you need to and you’ll get to half the people you hoped. So just I I cannot stress it enough like consistency. Eighth grade level, frequency walk, you know, walk the talk. Just listen. The people are going to deliver the plant. You’ve just got to change them as

[00:46:47.08] spk_1:
the work is getting done. You know, now you’re looking over everybody’s shoulders. You’re talking about a 400 person organization. Okay, If it’s a four or eight person organization, the work is still getting done. While the CEO is not looking right there off somewhere,

[00:47:05.68] spk_0:
that’s and that’s another. I’m glad you brought that up. That is another very important part of communication. I’ll do it in an engineering way for you. Okay. Engineers, software engineers particularly, you know, they work in the dark and they work late at night, and they work alone,

[00:47:24.58] spk_1:
like the nerds that we knew at Carnegie Mellon. You get either one of us was in computer science, but we we saw them that in the winter they were walking barefoot or in flip flops. They’re always there. Always a couple of steps out of sync. But, you know, they’re They’re now leading professors at M I T. Or their founders of Google or Amazon from the 19 eighties. Yeah, they

[00:47:55.28] spk_0:
prefer to work alone. They prefer to work in the dark. Okay, great. That’s an over generalization. All my software friends. But you probably agree the so and their programming. They’re building your product, right? So now how do you guide their innovation? They’re making decisions alone in the dark at 3 a.m. In the morning.

[00:47:56.73] spk_1:
Yeah,

[00:50:01.16] spk_0:
well, how do you guide their decision? Well, it’s gonna be It’s gonna come down to two. Did I give them a vision that they can work with him, right. So book activates. Satisfied? Right? I said satisfy. Right. And we’ve had discussions. So with book activates satisfy, you might, you might hold after you announce the grand theme, you might hold a session just on book just on activate. Just unsatisfied, right to explore it an even greater depth. Eventually, this this guy figures out because we’re talking about satisfying so much right that when a client using his software puts the wrong inventory in or when the inventory isn’t up to date, the software doesn’t work as well, and it doesn’t create as much value as the customer would like. And he comes up with a way to automatically grab their in their inventory at 3 a.m. When no one else is around. But he wouldn’t have known him. If you hadn’t have done all that work communicating right, he might have come up with a way to make it cost less right, which might have been welcome. Might be welcome. When you’re growing a company, I never worry about the cost. It’s like if the growth plans work, the cost will never catch up. All right, we’ll be growing too fast. So you know, that’s that’s the difference is what are these people thinking when they’re on the front line and a nonprofit example? Right? Let’s say you’re a food bank that wants to work more with partnerships, okay? And your local church has a has a food bank that could partner with the big food bank. Right? Um, but you know that in that food bank, the intention of forming those partnerships is to reach people. You’re not currently reaching right, which is very different than an intent of to reach people more effectively using a local organization more efficiently, right?

[00:50:06.06] spk_1:
Yeah. You’re talking about a new market.

[00:50:34.86] spk_0:
Yeah. Those are the two reasons you might do it. Well, if you’re if you know this person who runs a food bank at your church, you can you would now ask them. Well, who are you reaching and see if you know it’s the same person already, right? Or etcetera, etcetera. So you can make a more intelligent decision at your level because you understand the vision, the strategy, what’s important, what’s being measured. And it’s going over and over and over again. Yeah, yeah.

[00:50:48.86] spk_1:
Let’s talk about holding individuals accountable through the review. Um, looking at the challenges that they’re facing, what their personal plans are. Let’s talk about that whole accountability review.

[00:52:23.45] spk_0:
So, um, couple of things one As the leader, you must be personally involved in the review and in the details, and you must personally know the progress that’s being made. Okay, Um, so you need to establish the metrics. Well, first of all, you need to do this in a regular timing kind of way. So you need a cadence What I would call a management cadence. Now, with each initiative, there’s a couple of choices you could decide I’m going to meet Weekly. All right, so now you have a weekly meeting, that sort of independent of the nature of the initiative. But weekly, we’re getting together and we’re talking about it. Okay, that’s that’s one way to do it. And for some initiatives, that’s really good. Other initiatives are a little bit weirder ago, right? Some actions like the first actions might take a week. The next action might take a month, right? For two months. So you might want to have meeting the first week and the meeting the next week to make sure you did everything from the first week. You might want to delay it for another three weeks. So there’s something needy in the meeting. Right? Something’s changed. Now, Um, I believe that, uh um I have so many quotes from this. This guy I used to work with, Um, but one of them was personal embarrassment. Is that the number one driver of human behavior now we should not abuse

[00:52:25.31] spk_1:
that management by fear

[00:53:46.15] spk_0:
we should not have embarrassment. But another way, if you flip that to the positive personal recognition is also the number one driver of human behavior. So I believe in team meetings with everybody is involved. All right, so that we can look at the metrics. What are the results? Okay, those are the results. That’s five minutes. All right. Next most important question is on this initiative. Last week, we said we were gonna do this. This and this last meeting. We said we’re gonna do this, this and this. We’re gonna go around the room. Did you do it? That’s the first question. Yes or no? Okay. Yes or no? I also have this page tourism that we are not trying to be. Washington here. We are not trying to create a culture of blame. Okay? Because it’s useless. And you can see that, right? The You know, we’re not just trying to figure out who the millennium? No, we’re trying to understand, So if you didn’t do it, just say you didn’t do it. Now, if you didn’t do it for six weeks, you’re You know, I never yelled and I never saw in any meetings. But I’ve been told that I could make the air feel very heavy. So a little bit of tension is a good thing for the whole team. And if the person continues to not deliver, well, then it’s a private conversation. You’re

[00:53:50.07] spk_1:
going to have that conversation,

[00:54:01.84] spk_0:
but it really isn’t it much better for them to feel accountable in front of the team and just accountable to you, right and and like and have the teams say, Come on, we gotta get this done.

[00:54:44.54] spk_1:
Yeah, yeah, I can see your part that’s going to bring a team together If if folks are folks are willing to open up and say, you know, we’re not on radio so I can say no, I fucked up. I just I told you two weeks ago this was a priority, and I haven’t made it a priority and and I will in the next two weeks. You know, if somebody I think if somebody can say that openly to their to their to their CEO and to their team, maybe even more more so to the team, then you know, then there’s Then there’s that. Then it is a team, okay? This guy didn’t pull his weight. She come a little short. We can, you know, next week. It might be me, but it’s an environment that that supports us and isn’t beating us down now. But you like, you know, you say if it’s six months or you know, whatever you know, then then we have to go a different

[00:54:53.97] spk_0:
strategy. But

[00:54:55.41] spk_1:
that can bring a team together. That kind of opened this. I think

[00:57:37.23] spk_0:
you You are 100% correct, and the rest of the team appreciates it. Right? So another important part of this cadence meeting is that you set the example for this. That you’re you’re inquisitive. You want to understand the problem. You want to help. You’re not there to go. You didn’t do it. I move you to this side of my ledger. When you do it, you go back to the other side. No, I mean, that’s fine. And then the other thing that’s popular today is the stand up meeting. We’re going to do this all in five minutes. Yeah, you know, do you You don’t understand anything in five minutes. That’s appropriate for some meetings, but on this. What you’re trying to find out is what’s holding me back. If you’re If you’re leading an organization like I was leaving, we’re If the company didn’t grow, it was me. I was done right? You very quickly. If you have half a brain at all, you’re walking around every day trying to figure out what’s what’s going to prevent you from growing. Okay, that’s all you care about, right? You’re like and every issue a people issue, customer issue operations issue, it all gets reduced to. Is it going to prevent me from making my plan? And if it is, how are we going to solve it quickly so that it accelerates me towards that plan? Right. Um so So that’s that’s what you want, Everybody. You want everybody understanding your behavior and your questions in those terms and that we’re all on the same team trying to do this and what happens is you’re right. The team gels the people who people want to finish by the meeting. You have to have the meetings that are forcing function people most of their work the night before the meeting. That’s okay with me. Okay? Right. And yeah, you keep them open. And let me tell you the people you have all kinds of levels of people in this meeting. Anyone who can affect this is in this meeting. Okay? And what happens over time if you set the right example? Number one, the people at the bottom will come to you. And they say I so appreciate being in that meeting with you and watching you think through these problems. Mm hmm. Your direct reports. The people report directly to you that those people report to They’ll start jumping into the meeting, doing the same thing. So so And so, Joe Joe down at a low level, says I tried to get it done, but I couldn’t. Because of this. Right? In the first meeting, I’ll go. Okay. Well, how are we going to fix that? In the third or fourth meeting? The person who reports to me will go Joe right after this meeting, come to see me. We’re going to fix that. And now I’m now I’m not on cruise control, but we’re all together. We’re all together, just trying to make this happen.

[00:57:48.53] spk_1:
Not all plans are gonna work, right?

[00:58:53.72] spk_0:
No, no, Absolutely not. I’m telling you that, uh, tell you two things. One. I never walked into a company and said, You doofus, is you didn’t know you should be doing this. Never, never found, never walked in and created a new plan. Okay, what I did was I walked in, Um, and there’s this guy can itchy. Oh, my is a Japanese guy who wrote something called the Mind of the Strategist. And I’d look at the situation and I try to break it into pieces, okay into the logical pieces and then work on each piece to see how I could make it better and then put them back together. Not all of them came back together. Some we put to the side others we made. In any case, that’s a little bit material. But the the plans that we followed always existed in the business before I got there. But with some modifications, we you know, we have adopt them with some modifications, and then we’d execute.

[00:58:55.82] spk_1:
But you think the plans were already there?

[00:58:57.82] spk_0:
Sure. The ideas were already there. The idea of the middle

[00:59:00.49] spk_1:
step middle step wasn’t getting done. The execution

[01:00:23.51] spk_0:
first company I went to had a product that they were going to introduce that they’ve been talking about for five years. We introduced it in 13 months. I sat in the music, we had to introduce it. We had we had a new market we wanted to enter, and they they just went round and round and round on whether it was the right market to enter. You can always find a reason not to do something. It’s a lot easier to find reasons not to do something than it is to find reasons to. There’s almost this, Uh, there’s almost this mindset like, Well, we got to find something that no one in the industry has ever thought of. Well, that’s Yeah, good luck with that. That this never happens, right? No, you got to execute better than other company. So, you know, we had this market we wanted to enter, and everybody was disproving why we could enter it. And at some point I just said, No, I think we can do it. Let’s try it and we went after it. And that company is thriving in that market today. Alright, the last software company that I ran. Same thing. There’s a new market. We went after it. We’re leading in it right now, right? Um, but it was an idea that had been around forever. There was another market to where they actually convinced themselves there was no way to make any money in it. And we will. It’s that it’s

[01:00:38.01] spk_1:
avoiding that scarcity mentality and that, you know, it’s a focus on how we can, instead of why we can’t because it is always easier, much, much easier to find reasons why you can’t do something to evaluating and execute on a plan to do something. So I always say, Let’s look at how we can instead of why we can’t

[01:01:23.11] spk_0:
that that market that’s an interesting one, that market. I won’t tell you to many of the details because it’s active right now. But it’s about half of their new business right now. Okay? And and I had to move 30% of the engineering resources in that company to focus on that new market, and they were already booked, you know, they would have told you they’re booked 150% alright. So and did some things fall off the table and the status quo? You bet they did. We lived with it. We found ways around it, right? I mean, that’s But that’s the point where you see as the leader, I can’t walk away and say Figure it

[01:01:23.90] spk_1:
out. Well, that’s the belief in the plan.

[01:02:06.20] spk_0:
I’ve got to be part of the team that figures it out, right? Yes. I’m still the leader. I’m not. I’m not coming up with the solutions, but I’m asking the questions. Right. What can we do? How can we do? Tell me what we could, you know. Okay. Well, I moved. Oh, I moved 35 people over there, and you need one of them back, or you can’t get this done. So what you’re telling me? Yeah. Move them this afternoon. You know, I moved 35. Guess where I got that number? Yeah. You know, out of the air. Right. But but in some companies, that question never get out. Joe moved. Joe moved them. Can’t move them back. Okay.

[01:03:34.60] spk_1:
All right, Joe. Thank you, Joe. Pager. A reminder that Joe pager is available to consult with your non profit on everything we talked about. Strategic execution change management, leadership, fraternity, pledge training. You can reach him on LinkedIn. Remember, it’s P A J E r. Joe. Thank you very much. Good to have this conversation. You shared some excellent ideas. Appreciate your wisdom. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Pleasure. Next week, corporate funding. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by turning to communications, PR and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission. Turn hyphen. Two dot c o. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. Shows Social Media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy. And this music is by Scott Steiner. Thank you for that information. Scotty, you’re with me next week for nonprofit radio. Big non profit ideas for the other 95% Go out and be great. Mm hmm. Mhm. Yeah.

Special Episode: Your Dismantling Racism Journey

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My Guest:

Pratichi Shah: Your Dismantling Racism Journey
Starting with your people, your culture and your leadership, how do you identify, talk about and begin to break down inequitable structures in your nonprofit? My guest is Pratichi Shah, founder & CEO at Flourish Talent Management Solutions.

 

 

 

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[00:01:49.94] spk_0:
welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host. This is a special episode of non profit radio to help you be the change around racism and white privilege. You’re dismantling racism, journey, picking up from our last special episode, starting with your people, your culture and your leadership. How do you identify talk about and begin to break down inequitable structures in your non profit? My guest is pretty sheesha. Founder and CEO at Flourish Talent Management Solutions were sponsored by wegner-C.P.As guiding you beyond the numbers wegner-C.P.As dot com by Cougar Mountain Software Denali Fund. Is there complete accounting solution made for non profits tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant Mountain for a free 60 day trial and by turned to communications, PR and content for non profits, Your story is their mission. Turn hyphen two dot studio. It’s a real pleasure to work. Um, welcome. I’m not working. I’m welcoming. I’m welcoming pretty sheesha. She’s an HR strategist and thought leader with 25 years experience in all aspects of talent management. She’s making her face when I say 25 years, Human resource is equity and inclusion and organizational development in the non profit and for profit arenas. She’s founder and CEO of Flourish Talent Management Solutions. The company is at flourish. Tms dot com Prodigy, Welcome to the show.

[00:02:01.84] spk_1:
Thank you so much, tony. I appreciate me here.

[00:02:44.80] spk_0:
It’s a pleasure. Pleasure to have you. Um, and I’d like to jump right in your if you’re ready. Um, absolutely. You know, racism and white privilege most often look very benign on their face. I had a guest explain why use of the word professional in a job description is racist. I had a more recently, I had a guest explain how not listing a salary range in a job description was felt racist to them. So how do we begin to uncover what is inequitable and right under our noses yet not visible on its face?

[00:03:07.84] spk_1:
Yeah, you know it often it starts with listening. I mean, to state state a bit of the obvious. It really does serve listening. It’s understanding for organizations, it’s understanding where we are. Eso it’s listening to the voices that may not have been centered. We’ve become better as organizations and being responsive to staff. I hear that a lot kind of Hey, this is what my staff is telling me. This is what we need to do. But the question is, is, Are you responding to the voices that have possibly been marginalized? Likely that marginalized or oppressed in the past? General responsiveness is not the same as centering the voices that really need to be heard. So it’s first off just understanding where you are as an organization and listening to the people who may have experienced organization in a way that is different than you think.

[00:03:41.67] spk_0:
So when you say general responsiveness is not what not adequate, not what we’re looking for, what do you mean by that?

[00:03:50.11] spk_1:
So a lot of time, the voices that are saying, Hey, something’s wrong or we need to do this or we need to do that are not the voices of those that have been marginalized and oppressed. They tend to be maybe the loudest voices there, speaking maybe from a place of privilege, and that needs to be taken into account. So being responsive. For instance, if the I call it kind of the almond milk issue being responsive to a staff that says in addition to dairy milk for coffee this is back when we’re in fiscal offices. Um, we need almond milk, too. But the question is, is, Are we listening to the voices of those that weren’t able to consume the dairy milk? It’s not a perfect metaphor. It’s not a perfect analogy because that one ignores actual pain, and it just talks about preference. But are we listening to the voices of people that have been impressed who have who have been, who have heard the word professional or professionalism wielded against them as a pad as an obstacle in their path to success in their path to career advancement? Those are the voices that we need to listen to, not the ones who have a preference, for one thing or another.

[00:05:00.05] spk_0:
Okay, let’s be explicit about how we identify who who holds these voices. Who are these people?

[00:05:19.34] spk_1:
It’s people that have have come from. It’s particularly right now when we talk about anti black racism, we need to censure the voices of those from the black community, and that means those who have either maybe not joint, not just not joined our organization for particular reasons, but maybe they have not joined our board. Maybe they have not participated in our programs that maybe they haven’t had the chance to. So it’s really from an organizational perspective, think of it, is understanding what our current state is. So how does your organization move? People up, move people in, move people out. If if we don’t have the voices in the first place because maybe we’re not as welcoming as we should be, then what does the data tell us about who’s coming into our organization, who is leading our organization, who is able to move up into our organization, what our leadership looks like, what our board looks like? So at times the fact that there is an absence of voice is telling in and of itself, and our data needs to be able to explain what is going on so that data needs to be looked at as well.

[00:06:44.14] spk_0:
All right, so we need to very well, good chance we need to look outside our organization. You’re talking about people that we’ve turned down for bored, bored positions turned down for employment. Um, I’m not even going to say turned down for promotion because that would presume that there’s still that that presumes there still in the organization, but I’m talking about very likely going outside the organization. People who don’t work with us who aren’t volunteering ho aren’t supporting us in any way. But we’ve marginalized them with cast them out before they even had a chance to get in.

[00:06:47.88] spk_1:
Potentially. Yeah, have been actually, probably probably there is something that they have not found palatable or appealing about working with us or being a sensor or being off to your point of volunteer. So we need we need to look at why that’s happening.

[00:07:28.04] spk_0:
Okay, I’ve got it. I got to drill down even further. How are we going toe? Identify these people within. Within our organization as it is. How are we gonna figure out which people these are that we’ve marginalized these voices of color? Um, over the just like in the past five years. What have we if we’ve done this, how do we identify the people? We’ve done it too.

[00:08:44.48] spk_1:
Yeah, you know, it really is a complicated question. It will differ my organization, right? It differs by what your subsector is. How things slow within a subsector the size of the organization. A really good place to start is understanding who has turned us down. Why have people left? So take a look at exit interviews. Even if you’re not doing exit interviews. We know that there is not always a nature, our presence and a lot of our organizations. If there aren’t formal exit interviews first, well, it’s my time for those because we need to understand why people are leaving. But if if there isn’t a formally h your presence, what do we know about the circumstances under which someone left organization or said no to a job offer or said no to a board, position or volunteer? It’s also important to ask, expanding our definition of stakeholder groups, engaging with all of our stakeholder groups as as broadly defined, us possible. And with in those groups understanding, are we reaching out to a diverse audience to say, Why would you engage with us? Why would you not engage with us in any of those roles? So, yeah, it’s gonna be a little bit harder to understand the people who are not there because they’re not there. Okay.

[00:10:02.96] spk_0:
All right, so All right. Um, we go through this exercise and and we identify. We’ve identified a dozen people. They’re not. They’re not currently connected to us. And ah, maybe that they have had a bad experience with us. Yeah, they may have turned us down for employment because they got offered more money somewhere else that could that in itself could be that itself. Could be not something other than benign. Um, but let’s say they moved out of the state, you know, they were they were thinking about. So So in some cases, they may not have a bad have had a bad experience with us, but in but in lots of cases, they may have. They may have turned down that board position because they start the current composition of the board. And they didn’t feel they felt like, maybe being offered, you know, a token slot or whatever. Whatever it might be, I’m just I’m just suggesting that some of the some of the feelings toward the organization might not be negative, but some might very well be negative of these dozen people we’ve identified in all these different stakeholder potential stakeholder roles that that they could have had what do we reach out to them and say way? Get them to join a conversation with an organization that they may feel, uh, unwelcoming.

[00:10:10.53] spk_1:
Yeah, it’s a great question, and I think right now, especially we tread carefully. Weigh tried carefully, and we honor the fact that they, in fact, might be getting that same question from many other other organizations friends, colleagues, family members in which people want to understand something. What we’re seeking to do is not be educated on the overall picture of white privilege, weight supremacy, off dominant narrative and dominant culture that’s on us. That’s on all of us individually to understand that that is not the men that is not up to the member. It was a press society started to tell us that. Great. So what they What we want to understand is kind of What did you experience with our organization? What was the good? What was that? And first of all, do you even want to engage with us? Is this not a good time to do that? Because you’re already exhausted, I said to ah, calling recently, You know, we can’t even understand the reality of what it’s like to live the re it to live that reality. And for many to leave the charge right because they’re also showing leadership in the movement. So, Teoh, we can’t even understand what those layers of existence or like, So we think it’s treading very carefully. And should we have the ability to engage with someone because they have the space, the energy, the desire, then I think it’s understanding and asking kind of what’s going on for us. What? Where did you find us? Either Not a feeling or Where did you Why did you not want to work with us in whatever capacity we were asking? And it’s asking that question.

[00:11:40.34] spk_0:
Okay, well, that’s further down, right? I’m I’m just trying to get to, like, what’s the initial email invitation look like?

[00:11:46.71] spk_1:
It depends on the organization. Eventually organization. It depends on the relationship. I wouldn’t presume to give words to that, to be honest with you, because because I think it also depends on the person that you’re asking. I don’t want toe offer kind of a link. It was on December inadvertently token ice people by saying, Oh, of course, we’re gonna want toe engage with us. So I really think it’s dependent on the situation,

[00:12:10.64] spk_0:
okay, and and what do you inviting them to do with you? Have a conversation. Share your experience with us? Is it?

[00:13:12.23] spk_1:
Yes, essentially. I mean, that’s what it boils down to, but again, it really depends on where the organization is, right? So this is your data collection moment. This is information collection. Where else are you collecting information? What what else do you know? What other steps have you taken to begin that educational process? Because there’s there’s kind of a dual purpose here, right? Is understanding who we are in where we have contributed to search for a race of them, to pretend to a culture that does not support differing viewpoints, differing populations that is in some ways upholding white supremacy, or is completely holding, upholding white supremacy and its culture. There’s that general education of understanding all of that. And then there’s understanding what our organization’s role is right, so it’s both and eso. It’s really highly dependent upon. Where is the organization case? Warez You’ve talked. Teoh, the head of equity in the centre, describes a cycle that is brilliant around awake to woke to work. Where are you in that cycle? Are you? Where are you on a where you in vain? Pluralistic, Where you and being inclusive. All of those things depend on what you’ll ask and how you’ll reach out. And if you even should reach out there, maybe work that is to be done internally before that reach out can happen again. Just being considerate and sensitive of those who are willing to start, you

[00:13:46.24] spk_0:
know? Yeah. Okay. Was our guest for the last most recent special episode on this exact same subject. Thank you.

[00:13:53.53] spk_1:
Yet the organization is doing, and it has been since its inception, has been doing incredible work. A is leading that work on dhe. Both her warrants always contain wisdom, and the products that they’ve put out are extraordinary.

[00:14:25.14] spk_0:
How about in your work? Are you facilitating the kinds of conversations in your practice that you and I are talking about right now? Do you bring these outside folks in Sometimes too. Teoh have these conversations

[00:14:27.53] spk_1:
sometimes? Yes. Sometimes again, being highly respectful of if they didn’t want to engage with us, Do they even want to talk to us right now? My work really is around having an organization understand where it is right now. So what is its current state. What is the desire in future state? Right, So we know that we want to be a racially inclusive, racially equitable organization. Likely that’s already been defined. But what does that mean for us is an organization if it means solely in numbers piece rate, like we want to be more divorces aboard. Okay, that’s fine. But beyond that, how we make ourselves have a board culture that is appealing to those people that we want to bring in to work with us. So it’s kind of defining with current state and understanding current state to finding future state and then developing the strategy to get there.

[00:15:44.34] spk_0:
OK, now you and I were talking about you said you were still data gathering. So we’re still defining the current culture as it exists. Right? Okay. Okay. And your work, you You centered around people, culture and leadership. Can we focus on leadership? I feel like everything trickles down from there. Very chill. No, I don’t know. Are we okay? Are you okay? Starting with a leadership conversation or you’d rather start somewhere else?

[00:15:51.24] spk_1:
No, we can We can start that. Fine.

[00:16:04.54] spk_0:
Okay. Um So what? What is it? We’re looking for leaders of our listeners of small and mid sized nonprofits to to commit you.

[00:16:10.34] spk_1:
I think it’s first of all committing to their own learning and and not relying on communities of color to provide that learning right again, going back to what we said earlier. It’s not relying on those who have been harmed or a present to provide. The learning is the first of all. It’s an individual attorney. That’s a given. Okay,

[00:17:09.24] spk_0:
I like toe things like people. I like action steps. So we’re talking about our individual journey, our own learning. I mean, I’ve been doing some of this recently by watching YouTube watching folks on YouTube. Of course, now, right now, I can’t remember names of people, but no Eddie Glaude eso Eddie Glaude is a commentator on MSNBC. He’s just written just released this last week. Ah, biography. I am not so much a biography of James Baldwin, but but an explanation of Baldwin’s journey around racism. Um, so that’s one example of, you know who have been listening to. So we’re talking about educating the learning from thought leaders around yeah, revealed structures with reading books, listening to podcasts

[00:17:44.20] spk_1:
absolutely around its around structures. But it’s also understanding things that we do all the time and organizations and how I, as a leader, might eventually those right. So it’s sometimes the use of language to your point about the use of the word professional language tends to create our realities so another language will build a bridge or not. So how do we use our language? How do we use our descriptors? How do I show up as a leader in my own kind of inclusion or not? So I think it is absolutely that it is looking at thought leaders around things like structural racism around the use of language around people’s individual experiences to get that insight and depth. Because it’s not just a kn intellectual exercise. This is emotional to and therefore has to have emotional residents.

[00:18:47.24] spk_0:
Okay, thank you for letting me dive deeper into a personal your own personal journey, your own personal education, fact finding and and introspection. You’re talking about something, you know. And it zzz No, no revelation. This is It’s difficult of It’s painful. You know, you you’re very likely uncovering how you offended someone. Uh uh How you offended? Ah, group. Um, if you were speaking in public and something comes to mind or how you offended someone in meetings or, you know, multiplied, I don’t know how many times I mean, this introspection is likely painful.

[00:18:50.74] spk_1:
Likely? Likely. Yeah, more often. More often than not, I can’t. I can’t really envision it. Not at some level. They painful,

[00:19:08.88] spk_0:
but you’ve caused pain. You know that there’s a recognition there. Yeah, painful for you. But let’s consider the pain of person or the group that you, uh I don’t know, offended, stereotyped. I mean, put off whatever it is you’re

[00:19:31.28] spk_1:
that’s right. And that that’s why the work. As much as I know, you know, just some degree, people want this to be work that could be kind of project managed, if you will. Or it could be put into a process or a series of best practices arrangements to some degree, not very much, but to some degree, yes, absolutely. The sum of a little bit of that can happen. But that in and of itself is a bit of the dominant narrative, right. That, and of itself, is kind of at that centering white culture. So I think What we need to understand is this is not just going to be again, Teoh. Sorry to be redundant, but it’s not just gonna be intellectual. The fact that pain has been caused dictates that this be emotionally owned as well. It can’t be on life. It can’t be just intellectually owned with a project plan that I keep over here on a chalkboard or something like that.

[00:20:18.34] spk_0:
Emotionally owned. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Um, all right. So I made you die aggressive. Deeper. What else Rails you want toe? Tell us about leadership’s commitment on dhe. The importance of leadership. Commitment?

[00:22:22.54] spk_1:
Yes. So? So it needs to be explicit. It needs to be authentic. It needs to be baked into the leadership. Whatever leadership structure of the organisation has, it needs to be an ongoing piece of that leadership. So it’s not a Hey, let’s touch face on our quote inclusion initiative. If it’s an initiative, first of all, that’s not really doing the work. And he went, but it’s not something that lives separately from ourselves. Let’s have HR kind of check in on this or let’s have the operations person checking on this, but that’s not what this is about. It’s really it’s authentically being owned by leadership to say, Yeah, I know it’s gonna be painful. And in looking at our organization, we’re gonna need to understand why our leadership is remarkably homogeneous, which, in the case of many nonprofits, it is. If you take a look at building movement project and the unbelievably great work that they’ve done twice now, they just put out an update to their leadership, work around how people moves in sector or don’t and how people, communities of color and people of color are represented in our leadership. We can begin to understand that by and large, they’re they’re not on the why. That is a no oversimplification in some way. So I would encourage people to go to building movement projects, went site and check out their work. But you know what? Why are we so homogeneous? Why is there a board so homogeneous? It’s It’s also unpacking and uncovering that. So, to your point earlier about you know how we look at people and how they move through the organization. This is where you look at who is press right? Not just who’s not with us, but who is with us? How do people get promoted? How does that system work? Just any. It does everyone have the same information? Is it a case of unwritten rules? Is it a case of some people move up because they’re similar? Or they have have 10 years of experience, which is something that we like to say. How do you get 10 years of experience if you have not been given those chances to begin with? So is there life experience that weaken that we can begin to integrate in our conversations, these life experiences equally valuable are we putting too much of a premium on higher education, education and its formal kind of traditional form. Are we putting too much of, ah, of an emphasis on pedigree of other kinds of those? Those are the things that ultimately keep people out. So taking a look at leadership and having leadership commitment ultimately means looking at all of those things. There’s an overlap and how we look at leadership or people and or your organizational culture.

[00:23:01.74] spk_0:
Yeah, of course, this is a it’s a continuum or

[00:23:04.18] spk_1:
absolutely, absolutely, and the areas bleed into each other.

[00:23:25.68] spk_0:
Yeah, of course, yeah, um, you know, I subsumed in all this. I guess it’s OK for leaders to say I don’t know where the where the journey is going. I don’t know what we’re going to uncover, but I’m committed to having this journey and leading it and right, I mean supporting it. But I don’t know what we’re gonna find.

[00:23:32.52] spk_1:
Right, Right? Right. And that, in and of itself can be uncomfortable for a lot of people. And that’s the That’s the kind of discomfort we need to get okay with.

[00:24:03.54] spk_0:
Yeah, all right. Yeah. No, I had I had a guest explain that this is not as you were alluding to, uh, is not the kind of thing that we’re gonna have a weekly meeting and will be these outcomes at the end of every meeting. Then we have this list of activities and you know, the you know, it’s how come it’s not like that. How come we can’t do it like that? Yeah, because

[00:24:07.08] spk_1:
we’re dealing with hundreds and hundreds of years of history, and it’s because we haven’t been inclusive in the ways that we do things and we haven’t allowed whole Selves to show up that it is, um, it’s It’s complicated and it’s messy because it’s human.

[00:24:21.44] spk_0:
All right, so it’s not gonna be, is simple. Is our budget meetings

[00:24:28.54] spk_1:
right? Absolutely kind of hard.

[00:24:29.50] spk_0:
All right, we’re gonna have an outcome it every every juncture at every step or every week or every month. Yeah,

[00:24:35.03] spk_1:
that’s right. That’s right. And if we expect it to go that way, we are likely going to give ourselves excuses not to press on.

[00:24:44.44] spk_0:
All right, so that’s what it’s not. What what does it look like?

[00:26:08.14] spk_1:
So it absolutely looks different for every organisation. It absolutely looks different for over organization. And that’s why it’s so critical to understand, kind of. Where are we right now? Where are we? As for us, all of the components of our organization, Right? So, Roland again, Volunteer’s board staff culture, You said, you know, we were talking about people, organization and leadership, which is obviously a lot of my work. It is getting underneath all of those kinds of things to say. So who experiences our culture? How eso we do engagement surveys, right? A lot of times we do engagement employee surveys, that kind of thing. Are we looking at those dis Agra and adjust aggregated way. Are we asking different populations to identify themselves? And are we looking at what the experiences are by population? Are we asking explicit questions around whether or not you feel like you can be yourself in this organization? Whether you can provide defending opinions whether you feel comfortable approaching your boss will be back whether you feel comfortable volunteering for particular work, whether you feel like you understand what a promotion or performance management processes, whether you get you the support that you need or to what extent you get support that you need either from colleagues bus leadership, etcetera. So it’s looking at all of those things and then understanding all of a being experienced differently by different communities within our organization.

[00:26:14.24] spk_0:
You mentioned dis aggregating. That’s where the data is not helpful, right?

[00:26:20.02] spk_1:
That is where we look at the data in terms of populations.

[00:26:28.43] spk_0:
00 Aggregate. Of course, aggregating You’re stuck with a lackluster host now, of course. Yes, aggregate

[00:26:32.47] spk_1:
early in the week.

[00:26:48.84] spk_0:
Thank you. You couldn’t say early in the day. But thank you for being gracious. Okay? Yes, we we we want Teoh disaggregate. Of course um, and look by population and I guess, cut a different way. I mean, depending on the size of the organization, um, age race, uh,

[00:27:38.81] spk_1:
raises ethnicity of physical ability, orientation. All of those need to be in the mix gender as well, including gender fluidity. So really looking at all of our populations and then understanding, you know, for these particular questions, is there a difference and how people experience or organization we we know Then what we do know is that if there is a difference that there is a difference, we don’t know that there is cause ality unless there unless you’ve asked questions that might begin to illuminate that right. But there’s there’s always that difference between correlation and cause ality. And then what you want to do is get underneath that to understand why the experience might be different and why it might change along lines of gender or race or ethnicity or orientation or physical ability.

[00:27:45.14] spk_0:
Way wandered, you know, But that’s that’s fine.

[00:27:49.50] spk_1:
People in organizations are

[00:27:57.94] spk_0:
people, culture and leadership all coming together. Where where do you want to go? I mean, I would like to talk about people, culture and leadership What’s a good? It’s a good next one.

[00:28:42.74] spk_1:
Yes, well, so so this is what you’re doing, right? Is your collecting information and all of those three areas right and want it. So a couple of things that I would add to that is, when you look at people, you’re looking at their experiences. When you look at leadership, you’re looking at commitment, makeup, structure, access, all of those kinds of things. When you’re looking at culture, you’re looking at how people experience the culture, right? And so what? What is happening? What’s not happening? What state it out loud? What’s not stated out loud. What are the unwritten rules? There is also the peace are that that forms all of these things, which is operational systems, right? So things like performance management, things like where people may sit back when we were in physical offices at having access to technology. All of those kinds of things particularly important now that we’re not in physical offices. So just everyone have access to the technology and information necessary to do their job to do their jobs to do their work. So it is looking also at your operational side and saying How do we live our operational life? How do how two people experience it? Who do we engage with to provide service is for operations. How do we provide the service is, if you will, for lack of better term to our employees. So it’s also looking at that because operations ultimately permeates organizational culture, people and leadership, right, because it kind of sustains all of that. So taking a look at that, too, and finally, I would suggest again, as part of this and as a wraparound, is what is the internal external alignment, right? So I often hear people say, Hey, you know what? This is the subsector we work in people with think that we’re really equitable, but internally, we are living a different life than what we’re putting out to our stakeholders in our constituencies externally. So what is what is our external life, and how does that need to inform our internal world? It’s not unusual for me to hear that the external life, the way we engage with stakeholders or the way we put out program programmatic work is actually may be further along. To the extent that this is considered to be a continuum. It’s further along than the way that we’re living our life internally.

[00:30:19.33] spk_0:
Dishonesty there this disconnected It

[00:30:24.39] spk_1:
is a disconnect for sure. And possibly yes, dishonesty and hip hop made even hypocrisy.

[00:30:35.76] spk_0:
Yeah, All right, but again. All right, so that now we’re looking like this is organizational introspection. There’s individual learning and introspection. Now we’re at the organizational level, right? Being honest with our with our culture and our messaging.

[00:31:13.64] spk_1:
Right? Right. And so what I tried to dio is to help organizations kind of look at those things and decide how we might have all given the future that we’ve set our sights on and given some of the principles that we’ve laid out, how do we kind of get there? How do we How do we have all of our systems had a way of all of our people practices? How do we have all of our culture? So hence the need to look at all of these things that centered around people, culture and leadership. What about

[00:31:33.64] spk_0:
the use of a professional? A facilitator? Because, Well, first of all, there’s a body of expertise that someone like you brings, uh, but also help with these difficult conversations. Talk about the value of having an Anek Spurt facilitator.

[00:32:22.73] spk_1:
Yeah, absolutely So So you know, I think I think there’s always a level of objectivity and kind of in inside Look by an outsider that you that you benefit from. We go to experts for everything from you know or health to the extent that we have access to those experts, which is a whole different conversation on race and oppression. We we want external voice. What I would say is it’s a likely not going to be the same expert or the same facilitator. And I say expert in quotes for everything. So, for instance, I am not the voice to be centered on educating an organization around structural racism. I don’t think on the right voice to be centered. I would rather send your voices like those at, um at race forward at equity in the centre at those who have lived the results of 400 years of oppression. So you might want to call in someone for that discussion for that education. There are people that are better and more steeped in that and whose voices should absolutely be centered for that. You might want to call in a voice for White I’ll ally ship because there is some specifics around that that we need to talk about without kind of centering white races.

[00:32:53.93] spk_0:
I’m sorry, White ally ship. Yeah. What is that? So

[00:34:04.64] spk_1:
if we think about the or the organization right and are kind of culture and are people who who won staff sees themselves as an ally and how can they be good? How come Apple boy people be good allies, right? And how do how do we further and embed that in the culture on dhe? Then finally, So keeping that in mind that there are gonna be different experts or different facilitators for different things, you know who was going to be the person in my case, this actually might be May is to help us evolve our culture and our systems so that we can be more equitable and take a look at that. Who’s gonna provide the training because their skills necessary rightto have these conversations. There are foundational communication skills. There is the ability to give feedback. There is the ability to communicate across cultures across genders across across groups. There, his ability to be collaborative. So So also strengthening those skills while we continue to look at those things. But to think that all of this help is going to come from one source is not ideal and likely it’s even inappropriate because everyone can’t be everything. I don’t try to be the voices that I can’t be. It’s inappropriate for me to do that.

[00:34:18.84] spk_0:
What? Um, what else do you want? Oh, what do you want to talk about? Given the level where that we’re at, we’re trying to help small and midsize nonprofits inaugurate a journey around racism and white privilege.

[00:34:33.95] spk_1:
Yeah, E Look, first of all, I hear a lot of organizations say, like, what is the access point? Like, What do I get started doing? We put out a statement. Um, in some cases, we are experiencing some dissonance between the statement that we put out or the problematic work that we dio and the way that we’re living internally. So it is really understanding. Kind of. Where are we now? Through all of the ways that we’ve been talking about over the last several minutes, where we now what is it that we’re not doing that we should be doing? What is it that we need to be doing? How do we define for us if we have an equitable culture? If we’re living racial equity, what does that look like for us? Um, how does that affect our programmatic work? How does that affect our operations? Everything from our finances to our people processes to when we’re back in an office, even our physical set up. How how does that affect us? And how would we define that future state? So it’s understanding what is my current state? What is my future state and then understanding how we get there and it’s likely gonna be a long all of the areas that we said right? So individual journeys, some group and individual skill building some evolution of our systems and some understanding of kind of how we can support each other and support ourselves for those that are that affiliate with a particular group, Um and then kind of moving us along to that place of where we want to be. So it is. It is understanding where you are at that determines what your access point iss. But I would say if you if you have done the work of putting out the statement, then there. Then look for look for where you’re not living that statement internally.

[00:36:26.93] spk_0:
That sounds like a very good place to yeah, to start your search for for an access point because it’s so recent. Your organization’s probably said something in the past 56 weeks, absolutely close. Are you hearing to that to that statement?

[00:36:46.33] spk_1:
Exactly. And and we are incredibly, I would say important the use of the term, but almost fortunate that so many thought leaders have been kind and generous enough to share with us their thoughts on this moment. So not just within the sector, but all the way across our society. So many people have taken the time and the patients and the generosity amidst everything else that they’re living through. They have agreed to share their thoughts, their leadership, their expertise with us. So there is a ton of knowledge out there right at our fingertips, and that’s a that’s another really great place to start and says center the voices that most need to be heard

[00:37:18.87] spk_0:
at the same time. You know, we are seeing beginnings of change institutions from Princeton University to the state of Mississippi,

[00:37:40.47] spk_1:
right? Absolutely. Teoh. Hopefully, you know, the unnamed Washington football team. And to not far and places where we I didn’t know that change necessarily was possible. But we we are seeing change. And the important thing is is to not be complacent about that change,

[00:38:44.72] spk_0:
right? And not and also recognize, that it’s just a beginning, you know, removing Confederate statues, um, the room taking old glory off the Mississippi flag. These are just beginnings, but but I think worth worth noting, and they worth recognizing and celebrating because the state of Mississippi is a big institution and it’s been wrestling with this for I don’t know if they’ve been wrestling for centuries, but that flag has been there for that. Just out long 18. Some things, I think, is when that flag was developed. So it’s been a long it’s been a long time coming. So, recognizing it for what it is celebrating it, you know, to the extent that yeah, to the extent it represents the change getting up the beginning of change. All right. Um, well, you know, for teaching What else? What else? What else do you want to share with folks at this. You know, at this stage,

[00:39:19.56] spk_1:
you know, I think I think the main thing is, um didn’t dig it. We need to dig in on this. We need to dig in on this because in the same way that we have been living this society really societally for so long. Or organizations many times are microcosms of society. So if we think as an organization were exempt or that were already there, we’ve arrived at a post racial culture. That’s not the case. That’s just not the case. So where do you want to get it? Where do you want it again? Chances are good. You are doing some version of looking at issues within your organization, whether it’s your annual survey, if you do it annually, or whatever in which you can use that information to begin this journey so diggin from where you are. It’s one of those things that if you’re waiting, if you’re reading for kind of the exact right time or further analysis to begin the journey again, it’s not. It’s not based solely on analysis. There is a P. There is certainly information. There’s data that needs to be understood. But if We’re waiting for endless analysis Toe happen or Teoh kind of point us to the right time. That’s not going to happen. The intellectualism needs to be there. But again, as we said in the path as we said a few times during the course for conversation, this is about emotional residents in an emotional ownership and a moral obligation. So diggin, diggin wherever you are right now.

[00:40:46.20] spk_0:
What if I’m trying within my organization and I’m not the leader, not even second or third tier management or something, you know, How do I elevate the conversation? Uh, I presume it helps to have allies. What if What if I’m meeting a resistance from the people who are really in leadership?

[00:41:16.68] spk_1:
I think Look for the places where the remains, not the resistance, Right? So look within the organization. If there is resistance at a particular level, then you know who do you have access to in the organization where there isn’t that? I think I think starting out not assuming that you have solutions. If you have expertise in this area, if you have lived through the oppression as a member of a community that has lived through the impression, particularly the black community. I think you’re coming from one place if you are. If you are not in that community and saying that you have expertise, I think you have to be a little bit more circumspect about that and introspective about what you can offer in this vein on. And I think I think we want to look for the places where there is some traction. I think in most organizations it’s not unusual to be getting the question right now.

[00:41:50.41] spk_0:
And what is the I don’t want to call it outcome. What’s what look in the future look like for our organization? If we do embark on this long journey?

[00:42:02.14] spk_1:
Yeah, cultures that are equitable, in which people can show up as their whole Selves, in which there is not only one wrote right way to do things, which tends to be a very kind of white, dominant, Western culture, linear, sequential way of of managing work, of managing communications, et cetera, but that in fact, work can be a purged in a number of different ways, and that solutions can be approached in a number of different ways. People get to show up and give their all to these missions that we all feel very Narron dear. And so they are able, they’re empowered. They are able they are celebrated without sticking to a set of preconceived guidelines or preconceived, unwritten or written rules that don’t serve us anymore. Anyway,

[00:42:59.20] spk_0:
When you started to answer that, I saw your face. Lighten up. He your You know, it was a smile. It just looks like you’re faced untended. Not that you’re nervous. You’re facing hard to answer the where we could be.

[00:43:03.60] spk_1:
Who doesn’t like to imagine that future?

[00:43:09.30] spk_0:
Yeah, it was It was palpable. All right. Are you comfortable leaving it

[00:43:12.77] spk_1:
there? I think so. I think that what if we not covered that we need to cover for your listeners?

[00:43:18.70] spk_0:
Your know that better than I a place there at getting started.

[00:43:24.11] spk_1:
That’s fair. Look, you know what this is? This is the future that is written with many voices. And and while I think I can be helpful, I don’t presume to be the voice that has all the answers. I definitively don’t. I definitively don’t. And so what we have not covered is actually probably not known to me. But I dare say someone. Someone out there doesn’t know that. And they will likely be putting their voice up, which is exactly what we want.

[00:43:50.07] spk_0:
Yes, we will be bringing other voices as well. All right.

[00:43:53.06] spk_1:
No doubt. Yeah.

[00:43:54.31] spk_0:
Petition Shaw. She’s founder and CEO of Flourished Talent Management Solutions. And the company is at flourish tms dot com Petitti. Thank you so much. Thank you very, very much,

[00:44:13.89] spk_1:
tony. Thank you. Thank you for opening up this space and having the conversation. Ah,

[00:45:04.76] spk_0:
pleasure. It’s a responsibility and, uh, happy toe. Live up to it. Try trying. Were sponsored by wegner-C.P.As guiding you beyond the numbers wegner-C.P.As dot com My Cougar Mountain software, The Nolly Fund Is there complete accounting solution made for non profits tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant her mountain for a free 60 day trial. And by turned to communications, PR and content for non profits. Your story is their mission. Turn hyphen two dot ceo. Our creative producer was glad Meyer, huh? Shows social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guide. This music is by Scots. Many thanks to Susan and Mark for helping you get this special episode out quickly with me next time this week for non profit radio, big non profit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great