Dissecting my brain, Part II

Note: This entry is a continuation of a series I began a few weeks ago. 

Project LEAP classes

We began with an exploration into our personal leadership styles. This was accomplished by a very long, slightly confusing 360-degree evaluation survey that we filled out along with supervisors, peers, and ‘direct reports.’ I don’t have any direct reports at the staff level, so this was hard for me. I was also confused by a lot of the questions, which asked you to basically guess how your teammates would respond to certain phrases about you. Obviously, this is a quibble with the survey creators themselves, but I do want to note my lack of mind-reading abilities. (And none of this was helped by the fact that I took another, very long survey about myself around the same time for our first Beyond the Glass Ceiling retreat.)

During the actual class, we spent some time discussing the survey and then heard from a panel of deputy directors who talked about their roles, what they did to move into them, and how to work effectively with an ED. This portion was interesting and helpful. Some key points:

• Leadership styles vary by time, place, and context. One needs to be flexible and self-aware about her leadership style.
• You need to be intentional about filling certain roles within a team when hiring—both staff responsibility-wise and personality-wise.
• When working with an ED (or any supervisor), you need to work to fit in with whatever he or she needs in terms of support.

I found this session to be pretty helpful—hearing from those that are actually doing is good for me. It also flagged some areas that I can work on in terms of developing my own leadership and brought up some good questions. Yet more questions were to emerge from subsequent classes…

Class 2: Influence and Impact

In this class, we had to come prepared by doing some reading on influence and authority and the intersection of the two. The first part of the class consisted of some interesting exercises around “creative emergence,” which, according to the website, means “[fostering] the ways of being, thinking, strategizing, and acting that set the stage for new levels of creativity to emerge and the system to evolve to its next level.” The exercises were a little odd for me, but the core idea was interesting: we spend a lot of time categorizing, clarifying, selecting, and making decisions during the strategic planning process. Unfortunately, that is not where the best ideas are found. Instead, we need to explore, expand, visualize, and imagine in order to get outside of our heads and our typical (boring) activities.

This was illustrated by a fantastic exercise called “Yes, And,” based on ideas from improvisation (by the way, full credit for all these ideas and for leading the session goes to Michelle James, CEO of The Center for Creative Emergence). We took turns introducing ideas about a particular topic and then people had to respond by saying “yes, and…” introducing another idea on the topic. Then we took it further by replying “yes, that’s a wonderful idea because…” and supplying a reason. This may seem simple, but think about it: how often have you been congratulated and then told why your idea was wonderful by a lot of people? How often have you had people always respond in the affirmative to something you say and then continue to build on the idea? The feeling it produced was wonderful and we weren’t even talking about our work! Think about what it would do to your organizational culture if people were always building and growing ideas rather than limiting them or shutting them down. We might be able to get beyond some of the boxed-in thinking that keeps us trapped where we are now. Pretty cool!

The only downside to this class was that we had to do an exercise from a book that we hadn’t actually read. I have no idea how that teaching method came to be, but it was pretty confusing. Note to those designing classes/programs: making your students confused and frustrated right out of the gate isn’t the best way to foster a learning environment. 

Class 3: The Internal Organization

For this class, we brought in our organizational budgets and read a couple of chapters from a great book titled Financial Leadership for Nonprofit Executives. The chapters covered financial leadership and what it meant, discussed the balancing act between money and mission in a nonprofit organization, and noted the relationship between strong infrastructure and strong programs. I found the information VERY helpful and accessible, especially since I have absolutely no background in financial leadership at all. It was also helpful to learn about the diversity of budget sizes and staff levels of the organizations represented in our class. Some had a couple of hundred thousand, some had several million dollars. It was kind of surprising to me to hear the different levels of internal control that organizations had: some newer groups didn’t have a standard cell phone usage or reimbursement policy, some groups didn’t use timesheets at all, and some were working toward integrated knowledge management systems to keep all the staff informed of procedures. All the places I’ve worked have basically had these things, to a more or less stringent degree. For instance, I can’t imagine not using a timesheet to keep track of my work. Is that a fundamental difference between me and those who do not? Or is it just trivial? Yet more food for thought.

I’ve got at least one or two more entries about this to go, so stay tuned.