Ground Hog Days & Other Musings
As I write this letter the funeral for Tyre Nichols is streaming and The New York Times just announced “College Board stripped down some of its A.P. curriculum for African American Studies after heavy criticism from Gov. Ron DeSantis.” Happy Black History month everyone. (I hope the sarcasm came through.)
One of my favorite quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Writing during these times is a challenge because while we all work to end the racial inequities in our country it just doesn’t seem that we are making progress. Offering thoughts and prayers after mass shootings or the murders of Black men and women by our police, while sincere, hardly seem appropriate anymore. I honestly don’t know what does.
I look around at my Black friends and colleagues and see the resilience and strength they possess, and I know I have no right to feel discouraged. If they can keep on going, I certainly can.
Lessons Learned in 2022
Elinvar’s work continues to center around working with nonprofit boards as they move through leadership transitions. Happily, our track record of helping boards hire a leader who can successfully (and gracefully) follow a retiring ED or CEO is strong. Out experience tells us that nonprofit leaders who follow longtime EDs or CEOs can and will have staying power. Are there unique challenges? Yes! Can the right leader embrace those challenges and power through? Absolutely!
The board’s role in supporting the new leader is vital. Here are a few steps the board can take:
Embrace what you do not know and be ready to hear what your new leader brings to you. Doing so does not dismiss the wonderful work of your previous leader, but rather to acknowledge that all organizations have room for improvement.
Start your personal and organizational DEI work before a leadership transition takes place. Many nonprofits are eager to bring diversity to the leadership suite, but boards and organizations need to do the work first. You should not wait or expect a new, BIPOC leader take this on.
Recognize the needs of the staff and take steps to ensure they feel valued. The pandemic has been exhausting for many teams and going through a leadership transition will add to their workload as well as their stress.
Support your BIPOC leaders, particularly if they are your first leaders of color. BoardSource has great resources explaining how to be prepared to support this leader who has taken a leap of faith to take on your organization.
Boards are exhausted too! Make 2023 the year to take a look at your board development needs. If you are interested in exploring how we can help you with leadership search or board development, please give me a call! Patti at 919-622-5141.
NEW RESOURCES:
Another lesson we learned last year is that retiring from a long-held nonprofit leadership role is hard! We are happy to announce that two new coaches have joined our Alliance Partner group. Elizabeth Watkins Price and Robin Weinick are two coaches who assist retiring leaders as they adjust to their new life. The following article by Elizabeth explains how a mindfulness practice can benefit you.
Thank you for reading!
— Patti & Kelley
MINDFULNESS - AN UNEXPECTED TOOL FOR GREAT WORK:
Mindfulness meditation is commonly understood as a practice of clearing the mind of thought, a misconception that leads many people to think that their naturally busy minds are not well-suited to it or capable of it. The good news is that mindfulness meditation does not require your mind to be anything different than exactly what it is in this moment. The mind doesn’t need to be still or quiet or calm, and you don’t have to feel capable or beneficent or even optimistic. Instead, mindfulness is the extremely simple practice of paying attention to whatever is happening here and now without judging it. It sounds so easy when I say that genuinely that’s all that mindfulness means but tuning into the present without judging it proves challenging in practice. This experience of difficulty results from a combination of factors including the way that the mind is wired for survival and the way that culture has trained us to engage in an almost unceasing flow of judgment, criticism, and analysis.
Negativity bias makes humans naturally inclined to notice and internalize the difficulties of life since our minds tend to hold on to painful memories and feedback in an effort to keep us safe from future danger. When achievement culture and professionalism are layered onto this negatively inclined mind, as they often are for high achieving people, it is common for people to become exacting task masters spurring themselves towards ever higher levels of achievement and excellence. This blend of mental habits is so common that it may simply look like the way things get accomplished. Mindfulness asks us to interrupt these patterns and to abandon the metrics we traditionally use to value achievement if we want to do mindfulness “right.” Making this actionable often requires adding more compassion to the mind, to preempt the strong tendency towards judgment. Paradoxically, compassion, which we usually consider a soft skill, allows us access to a clearer and more curious frame of mind which is conducive to better thought about both personal and professional work. In this way, incorporating mindfulness can help be a foundation of greater traditional performance as well as greater satisfaction.
I’m an attorney and when I first started teaching mindfulness, my audience was frequently judges, clerks, magistrates, and lawyers from across North Carolina, a group that brought a fairly high level of skepticism to the subject. While there was often someone who didn’t want their professional development to include what they perceived as soft skills, what happened almost every time was that people who felt resistant to the idea of mindfulness were surprised and relieved to give themselves a break in this way. I’ve heard from lawyers and judges long after my sessions that these tools have transformed the way they relate to themselves or their stress or their work, and sometimes to all of the above.
— Elizabeth Watkins Price, Elinvar Alliance Partner