As I sit with nonprofit leaders in group meetings and in one-on-one coaching sessions, the level of exhaustion is palpable. The circles under the eyes are darker. The enthusiasm for new ideas short-lived. The willingness to take on important tasks and conversations lags. The laughs are slow to emerge.

Heather and I spend much of our weeks in conversation with executive directors and other nonprofit leaders. In recent months, we have noticed a rising level of decision fatigue. Some of the overwhelm is the result of responding to complex challenges: a pandemic, racial justice, political hostility, climate change and more. Some of the overwhelm is the byproduct of growing organizations: the decision-making practices for a staff team of six are very different from the decision-making practices for a staff team of ten or more. Some of the overwhelm is due to the relentless wave of external stressors which negatively impact our capacities and interpersonal dynamics. Add all this to the usual nonprofit menu of decisions and no wonder our typical practices are not up to the task.

The Great Return has begun. Here in North Carolina, mask mandates were lifted last week. Heather and I went to an in-person farewell event for a colleague last week. Many of our clients are slowly returning to their offices. We have some in-person facilitations on our calendars. It’s exciting to return to the creative sparks of in-person connections.

My garden is where I ground and center myself for the day. It’s also a place that can bring clarity to what I am seeing and learning in my work with nonprofits. Lately, as I putter, I’ve been reflecting on the act of “tending” and the ways that tending a garden reflects what it means to tend to an organization as a leader.

Many organizations are opting in with a hybrid meeting format, a fusion of virtual and in-person meetings to accommodate teams now made up of remote and in-person staff. However, with hybrid meetings, there's a risk of assuming it's essentially an in-person meeting with a few folks calling or Zooming in. Not so! We want to challenge that mentality.

At the end of October, our friend and colleague Melinda Wiggins was honored for her twenty-five years of service and leadership with Student Action with Farmworkers. I talked about three points that set Melinda apart from other executive directors, and they are important lessons for any leaders:

Despite our cultural habits to the contrary, time away from work is critical to our health, happiness, and productivity.

Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, early thinkers in the field of adaptive leadership, remind us that people do not resist change, they resist loss. Change that involves real—or even perceived—loss is painful and often difficult. Capable leaders have to identify, assess, provide context for, and manage that loss so people can move on to new behaviors and mindsets.

Gardening is the way that I ground and center myself. Being a gardener has also made me better at my work beyond my yard. Here is a bit of what I have learned…

Self-care is always a challenge for those of us who work on issues we care deeply about. This month, we wanted to share three simple tips to boost your self-care at work and at home.

If you want to have great meetings, there are a few common mistakes to avoid. By designing, facilitating, and participating in many, many meetings, we’ve figured out the five big biggest meeting mistakes not to make …

My Thursday was filled with joys and challenges. All in all, it wasn’t a bad day, just a full one. It’s not a day that I want to forget, as it was an important and meaningful day. I find myself having more and more of these kinds of days, and I think that the lessons I re-discovered might be useful in the future. I’m going to keep them front and center in this bursting season of Spring and thought you might find them helpful as well.

In last month’s newsletter, I shared the beginnings of my exploration into better understanding power and how nonprofits might gain and use power. On this quest, I’ve realized that thinking about how to use power to create change was just that—a how question. Before I get to how, I need to focus on better understanding the what. What is it that we are trying to change?

Have you ever found yourself thinking: I wish my board would get out of the weeds! Or: Why are board members so quiet during meetings? Or even: I really wish the board would help me think about the big picture for our organization. You, my friend, might find the three modes of governance helpful.

We believe that there’s no one way to understand the work of leadership and strategy, and so we combined three of our favorite concepts to build Academy Reconnect: adaptive leadership, the “big question”, and failure and improvisation.

I want to share a bit here about the more informal forms of learning and reflection. We live in a world with a constant flood of information and perspective. How do we make sense of it all? How do we decide what deserves our attention and what is frivolous? How do we figure out if what we are actually doing is contributing to our mission and goals?

At Third Space Studio, our days are filled with strategic thinking as we partner with nonprofit leaders to make progress on complex challenges. We value failure. We even host an annual Fail Fest to celebrate it! “Good Strategies Fail” felt just right for me and I immediately hung the post-it on the wall in my home office/studio.

We often get calls from nonprofits asking them if we can help them with a strategic plan. The typical calls starts with something like this: “Our last strategic plan is about to run out and we need to update it. Can you help us? Three years ago when we did this we held a board retreat and a special staff meeting and came up with our goals and objectives. We think that process will work again.”

Presented by Third Space Studio and BC/DC Ideas, the Individual Donor Benchmark (IDB) Project collects fundraising data from organizations with budgets under $2 million, seeking to identify trends nonprofits can use to evaluate their own fundraising success.

What’s relevant about these stories in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, you ask. Here’s what I heard as I listened to the waves. We have been in the midst of similar moments of stark life and death realities. We have experienced uncertainty and grief. There are people who have walked similar paths who have the wisdom to share with us all as we face this current crisis. We need this wisdom and it’s available to us …