Last week I facilitated a workshop on the Happy Healthy Nonprofit: Linking Nonprofit High Performance to Wellbeing in Santa Cruz hosted by the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County. Part of the workshop included an assessment and reflection about the causes of stress in the nonprofit workplace. I had participants use an online polling app to type in their answers and the combined responses generate a word cloud. The word "Perfectionism" was the most frequent response. It made me wonder … [Read more...]
Tips for Avoiding Collaborative Overload
What is Collaborative Overload? The potential for being overwhelmed by technology is magnified in the workplace by something called “Collaborative Overload” Rob Cross and Adam Grant in a recent Harvard Business Review article. Collaborative overload is defined as the burnout that results from our over reliance on e-mails, meetings and other collaborative technology tools that have, ironically, limited our ability to get stuff done. As nonprofits become networked and different departments work … [Read more...]
From Self-Care to We-Care: Black Lives Matter Strategy for Wellness
This photo is from an open space session during last week's Funders Learning Lab: Investing In Network Leadership. I proposed a session with a title, "Going from Self Care to We Care" to talk about how do we scale a culture of self-care in networks. The networks, nonprofits organizations, and movements are filled with people who are passionate about social change work, but often work hard and long with few resources and many just keep going without giving a thought to self-care. I posed the … [Read more...]
The Talent Development Pipeline: Putting People First in Social Change Organizations
Heather Carpenter and Tera Wozniak Qualls, along with Alexis S. Terry and Rusty Stahl have just published a new book, “The Talent Development Platform,” that provides strategic and practical information to help nonprofits guide, nurture, and strengthen the next generation of nonprofit leaders. Talent Development is all about guiding those rock star staff members who are able to contribute to the organization’s impact and success. This may be a foreign concept in our sector. Trish Tchume, … [Read more...]
Book Review: When Millennials Take Over and the Fluid Workplace
I am knee deep in developing a peer learning program for Millennial leadership development in nonprofit organizations that is designed based on the research out there. The last few months have been a time of deep reading and thinking many reports, research, and books. One book that resonated not only with this work, but my previous work on networked nonprofits is nonprofit technology colleague Maddie Grant's "When Millennials Take Over," written with Jamie Notter. When Millennials Take … [Read more...]
