Four Assumptions About Systems

Assumptions can be tricky. We need to be able to assume that some things are true in order to get up in the morning and make our first cup of coffee or tea. At the same time, assumptions are an expression of all of our habits and learned biases. We often use assumptions in place of facts.

One way I work with assumptions is to make an effort to state my own assumptions clearly, and often. Here are four assumptions I make whenever I help a group or organization work toward a goal.

Assumption 1.) Every group or organization is a system. Systems are synergistic, meaning they are more than the sum of their parts. How a system works is influenced by its boundaries and context, including the other systems it touches. Complex systems behave in ways that can be observed and intervened in; they create both predictable and emergent results.

Assumption 2. ) Systems produce what they are designed to produce: there are no “side” effects. Results that do not benefit one part of a system may benefit other parts of that same system. This is true for both natural and human-made systems.

Assumption 3.) Systems are Both/And. What we attend to most will grow; indiscriminate growth stunts fruition.

Assumption 4.) What we measure regularly will focus our attention and our resources.


How might these four assumptions about systems apply to your group’s current dilemma? What do they imply about your organization’s strategy review? What do these assumptions invite you to consider about the state of your backyard garden?

Paving a Better Way: What’s Driving Progressive Organizations Apart and How to Win by Coming Together

Last summer, a multiracial, multigenerational group of over 25 coaches, consultants, and capacity builders started meeting in response to our shared sense that internal conflicts at progressive organizations were undermining social justice movements. As part of this work, we rigorously read and discussed Maurice Mitchell’s article about key trends and fallacies in progressive movement organizations and the dimensions of organizational resilience needed to win.

We feel compelled to add to the critical conversation Mitchell has sparked by sharing our reflections, primarily as an invitation to other coaches, consultants, and capacity builders to sharpen our collective analysis, skillfulness, and accountability in working with organizations. We also hope that our reflections help organizations, staff, and leaders themselves apply these lessons to their own context.

We offer four interlocking observations:

  1. There is a fundamental cycle of disconnection that is driving leaders and staff apart. (Continue reading here)



Racial Justice Backlash, Burnout, and POC Leaders

White backlash from the last year of movement toward racial justice has fallen especially hard on Asian and Black leaders. I wrote this essay about how we can care for each other when gaslighting and exhaustion loom

This article was originally published in the Nonprofit Quarterly’s spring 2021 issue, “Radical Leadership: Visioning Lines of Flight.

White backlash is everywhere. It riots in our nation’s Capitol. It makes bold leaders tiptoe through the nonprofit sector. It causes a foundation to close its doors just as it begins to reckon with the intersection of misogyny and white supremacy. It makes headlines in education.

Unlike the vaunted conversations about leading organizations toward racial equity, white backlash—the hostile reactions of white people to that very possibility—often goes unnamed. So does its human impact: racial burnout.

Both backlash and burnout thrive without language to expose and examine them; but once they are called out into the open, leaders can strengthen themselves and each other. Inviting and framing that conversation is key to my consultations with people who want to stay in movements for racial justice for the long haul. (Continue reading here.)

Invitations for Ethical Community Care

Two years ago, I blogged about ways that building  meeting agreements can support equity and inclusion. As organizations have become more diverse, meeting agreements are often revealed to be rooted in unhelpful assumptions about what voices, cultures and assumptions are normative.

My current practice is to tell participants what I, as the group facilitator, need from them in order to fill my role, and to ask if there are additional behaviors they need from each other.  I often prime that conversation with the following invitations for ethical community care.

Lightly adapted from the work of Sandra Cisneros and the Macondo Writers’ Compassionate Code of Conduct, these are invitations to show up inclusively rather than rules to be enforced. They foreground ethical behavior over obedience, and are a guide to building relationships of mutual accountability. Most important, these invitations assume the survival wisdom, varied experiences, and cultural expressions of people of color are central to the group’s success. They explicitly invite us to counter white cultural norms.

12 Invitations for Ethical Community Care

  • Behave toward each other with kindness.

  • Be our most generous selves.

  • Respect and recognize the fullness of each other.

  • Point to what is beautiful, moving, and well-done.

  • Recognize our persistence, skepticism, and willingness to confront others as valuable survival skills.

  • Be creative.

  • Witness marginalization, and treat each other better than that.

  • Learn from our differences, so that we do not shut down an unrecognized part of ourselves.

  • Engage in respectful conflict openly, so that we may grow and learn together.

  • Declare ourselves present without silencing anyone else.

  • Sustain dialogue; release the expectation to have the last word, or to persuade others of the rightness of our opinion.

  • Invite wonder, humility, and awe.

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Leadership in the Time of COVID

Managers are accustomed to seeing their team members’ professional selves: dressed for work and focused on shared tasks.  However, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed more of our colleagues lives that managers may be used to seeing.  Even if our organization is accustomed to telecommuters, the current situation is not an ordinary “work from home” environment. Here are some visible and invisible aspects of the COVID-19 on the workplace that managers and leaders should consider as we work with geographically dispersed staff.

 

Our staff is doing more than working from home. They are working while under “stay at home” orders during an unprecedented global pandemic. People have a limited bandwidth of attention. While working every day, they are also responding to a constant stream of new information about a global health crisis. As staff adapts to how this new information impacts their work, home and community life, leaders are called upon to be flexible, adaptive, creative and responsive.

 

Philanthropy is not operating business as usual. Acknowledge that staff may need to set aside planned work in order to respond to the rapidly changing needs of grantee partners. Program staff are spending more time communicating with grantees and with peers in the field, working to identify effective responses to the current situation at a time when democratic government institutions are also being eroded. Likewise, grants management and finance staff may find that, to move those resources out to grantees, they have additional tasks that are not part of their usual work calendar. Effective leaders are helping our teams to slow down, sequence, and prioritize work expectations.

 

Flexibility means recognizing that we may not know all the constraints under which your staff is working. Many of us have experienced video meetings featuring an impromptu appearance by a child. Less visible onscreen are the coworkers who have increased elder care responsibilities, or who serve as a primary support for a relative or neighbor who is quarantined due to illness.  Flexibility may look like managers approving PTO for staff whose workloads haven’t changed. They may be carrying responsibilities that are usually held by a family member who works in health care; getting us toilet paper through supply chain logistics management; behind the scenes work in finance, emergency housing, government – those essential personnel who are working around the clock during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Adapting to the “stay at home” order will affect the mental and emotional capacity of people to work well. Restricted physical movement while sitting in front of a screen all day, and being trapped in low-stimulation environment of home, can both inhibit your team’s psychological well-being.  Video meetings are more physically demanding than face to face meetings; we can respond by making meetings shorter, and focusing them on shared visual content instead of faces on the screen.  The inability of people to gather for community celebrations of Passover, Eastertide, and ifthar during Ramadan may make online social time with colleagues even more important to everyone’s emotional well-being. Be sure to welcome team communications that are purely creative, or just for fun

 

Being a responsive leader means preparing for the ways the pandemic may affect the physical health of our colleagues, too. Staff are unlikely to tell us when they are facing food, medication or health care shortages, so our regular crisis communications can point out the resources available through telehealth or the Employee Assistance Program.  We should expect that people in our organization will become ill with COVID-19.  Make sure every supervisor knows the current policy on  ADA accomodations, PTO, Emergency Family Medical Leave and Bereavement leave. 

  

These are difficult times. Being an adaptive, responsive leader during a crisis requires more of us than managing people who are just working from home. We must allow ourselves more time to process more information, and to make more adjustments. We can put some time just to think into our weekly schedule. We can humanize our virtual workplace by letting a little more of our own personal context show - it will make us a more trustworthy leader

 

Taking care of ourselves is a way to model the creativity and caring we want our organization to reflect during these difficult and uncertain times.  Our own adaptiveness is the key to leading teams with the strength to get through this crisis together.

Nonprofit Leadership at a Crossroads

What new choices can we make at this intersection of racial inclusion, leadership succession and movement eldering ?

This article was one of the “Reader’s Top Five” in NonProfit Quarterly for 2019

“We wanted change. We planned for change. But not like this,” said one nonprofit program director, hired to succeed the founding executive upon retirement. “Is it that she just can’t let go? Or is it that she can’t let go to someone like me?”

The suffering is palpable: White nonprofit leaders and rising leaders of color, many of them women, find themselves in relationships full of anguish and confusion. The wounds from these conflicts feel personal, but their source is in structural shifts that are happening across the sector. We are in a moment of seismic change. The fault lines are both generational and demographic. And nearly every organization has been hit by collapsing expectations and flying debris.

This dramatic change was long predicted. Since 2002, NPQ has been reporting on how the sector has been preparing for founding directors, many of them early Boomers, to retire. Nonprofits and funders were abuzz: Where would we find new leaders to keep the sector afloat? How would we help the generation of founding executive directors to depart?

But this change included more than the departure of experienced leaders. While there was once an assumption that generational change would create a leadership vacuum, this notion of a void tuned out to be the inability of the sector to see a whole phalanx of people of color who were trained, able, and ready to lead.

Rising leaders of color often misread the reluctance of white founding executives to depart as arising from a sense of racial entitlement to a long-held job. But there are two forces at work here. First, there is the changing demographic in the field, which turns racism into blinders. Executives tend to mentor new leadership that looks and thinks just like them. White supremacy can make it hard for them to see the competency of someone who isn’t white. These executives are sometimes weary and ready to depart, but unable to see the successors to whom they can responsibly pass the baton. Meanwhile, able candidates are weary of waiting for their turn to lead.

Secondly, the social sector is experiencing a generational change. Leaders who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s are experiencing a cultural cataclysm similar to the ones they created as young adults, but they are now older adults on the other side of it. Those who were once iconoclasts and innovators are now the dominant holders of power in institutions for social change, and their self-image has often not caught up with that reality.

This history also means that departing leaders are not simply leaving a job. For some executives, leadership succession asks them to step away from work that has been their life’s purpose. They toiled at it for 60 or 70 hours a week, and it became the center of their social lives and their deepest political commitment. For these leaders, transitioning out isn’t simply leaving a job; it is often leaving a lifelong sense of purpose and community. We take the existence of many nonprofits for granted today. We forget that they are the legacy of social justice movement work that was, for decades, the commitment at the center of some people’s lives. And in white-led movements, once you step away from that kind of institutional leadership, there may be no useful place for you to go.


The pain of being caught in these social sector leadership transitions can feel like institutional dysfunction. In navigating the shocks and aftershocks of this leadership shift, it helps if the people involved understand two things: the disadvantage of institutions pursuing racial diversity without inclusion, and the leadership advantage that Black, Indigenous, and other people of color have when they are connected to a social movement culture that includes eldering.

Disadvantage: Leaders Departing from Snowcapped Peaks

A decade of advancing an incomplete “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) approach to dismantling white supremacy in the nonprofit sector has contributed to this painful moment. Many organizations have succeeded in hiring more racially diverse program and operations staff, then moved quickly toward developing a more diverse constituency of donors and are looking toward ensuring equitable outcomes for beneficiaries. They tried to skip the cultural transformation of shared power that is the product of inclusion.

This incomplete approach creates “snowcapped” organizations: places where staff of color carry the focus on equity and justice in frontline, mission-related work, while being clustered at the bottom of the institutional hierarchy. They have little voice, inconsistent influence, and lack the power to change the rules about how the organization works. The decision-makers on strategy and resource allocation sit at the top of the organizational hierarchy like the snowcap on a mountain, mostly white and white-haired people over 50.

This snowcap produces predictable cumulative results. I often find myself invited to meetings with nonprofit and philanthropic leaders who want to work on racial equity. But when I arrive, there are seven white folks! And they experience my work with them as tumultuous as an avalanche.

Having skipped the “I” in DEI work leaves these white-led organizations unhabituated to the programmatic strengths that experienced leaders of color bring to executive and governance decision-making. White boards and executives are often unfamiliar with the wide range of priorities, interdependent concerns, and deep relationships of accountability that executives of color routinely include in their work, and therefore challenge their leadership. Many organizations are familiar with people of color as experts leading DEI training or special populations initiatives, but not as the people who drive decision-making about organizational priorities. This is especially true in nonprofits that have hired for demographic diversity rather than diversity of lived experience and connection to diverse communities and networks.

During leadership successions in snowcapped organizations, boards and outgoing executives often contact me for help when they are blindsided by the consequences of having pursued diversity without inclusion. They are surprised by the need for new paradigms for thinking about their work and how they do it, and shocked by how quickly they must adapt in order for their organization to stay relevant and survive. Successions plans that do not consider that hiring a new executive might require racially and culturally diverse board and staff perspectives in decision-making can cause grueling transitions. Overwhelmed board members leave. Previously hopeful staff members lose their patience and insurrect. Unchecked microaggressions abound. The incoming executive may question whether they want to lead an organization so unready to support them. And the departing executive—one foot in, one foot out the door—may wonder if they should stay.

Advantage: Leaders who Keep Rising

I often coach rising executives of color who are perplexed by their white predecessor’s reluctance to depart. They assume the barriers to leaving are financial. It is unimaginable to them that retiring executives are struggling with being unable to envision a future in which they are useful and continue to have esteem and relevance.

There are wide ethnic and social variations among Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian cultures, but one thing they often have in common is a practice of eldering. Unlike white US culture, which associates “elder” with infirmity and marginalization, leaders of color often come from communities and movements where seasoned leaders continue to ascend in value, even after they have left the day-to-day leadership work. When they retire from full-time service, many of these leaders keep rising in recognition and esteem in communities where they become elders.

Movement elders—like the late Grace Lee Boggs, Loretta Ross, Barbara Smith, and Shirley Sherrod—are sought out, consulted with, and provide encouragement to mature movement leaders like Adrienne Maree Brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Leah Penniman. Elders of color who have retired from full-time leadership return to provide transitional support in moments requiring philanthropic unity; Johnnetta B. Cole and Ruth Simmons both returned from retirement to stabilize economically endangered HBCUs. Legendary foundation executive Handy Lindsey returned to the field to help a family foundation repair harms to the local Black community that helped to produce the donor’s wealth. These elders offer more than technical expertise. They have demonstrated a lifetime of skillfully nurturing leaders and institutions that support the well-being of their people, and as such are offered their community’s ongoing deference, preference, and respect.

This culture of movement elders offers significant advantages for nonprofit and philanthropic leaders of color who honor it. They arrive in new leadership positions with connections to wisdom traditions and a kitchen cabinet of experienced advisors that allows them to be both visionary and strong. Connection to movement elders provides the benefits of mentoring and accountability from a predecessor without the expectation of obedience or a struggle for control. This modeling encourages rising leaders to cultivate “bench strength” among emerging leaders in their organization and field. Movement elders provide living links to oft-untold chapters of history, including the multiracial histories of the social movements that seeded and grew into today’s nonprofits. Leaders can turn to movement elders to help them design antidotes to the single-issue narratives and single-constituent politics found in racially exclusive, snowcapped organizations.

Sector at a Crossroads: Crisis and Opportunity

Instead of thinking of the current demographic and generational shifts in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector as a crisis—a cataclysm, an avalanche, a void—we can think of our sector as arriving at an important crossroads. A crossroads is a place that asks us to carefully observe the barriers before us and make conscious choices about how and with whom we shall proceed.

If we acknowledge that we have come to a crossroads about the kind of leadership needed to take our sector forward, we can lessen our anxiety about departing from “the way we’ve always done things.” We will have space to recognize and celebrate the ways rising leaders of color are bringing forward the very insights and inclusive practices that we have been struggling toward. This pivotal junction for the field invites us to turn away from our habitual path of exclusion, a path that excludes both the contributions of seasoned elders and well-prepared younger leaders from the roles that await them.

A crossroads is a good place to pause. This is a moment for us to take stock and finally learn the skills we will need to carry us forward: the multifaceted practices of inclusion that are required if we are to be the justice and equity we seek to amplify in the world.

How Meeting Agreements Support Equity and Inclusion

We’ve all been there. The consultant or meeting leader whips out a flipchart page and cheerfully writes the heading “Ground Rules” or “Working Agreements.” They use colorful markers to write the same things at every meeting: Speak one at a time. Listen with an open mind.  Attack the problem not the person. You stifle a yawn.

That yawn is one of the reasons your organization is struggling with racial and gender equity and inclusion! Problem-solving meetings are places where your organization really show its values.  Setting the rules about how to work together is a key opportunity to disrupt inequity and foster inclusion. Why?

  1. Explicit rules disrupt inequity. Often, we invite a diverse group of people to meet, and we assume we’re all using the same rules of engagement – and we’re frequently wrong. Sometimes there is one set of rules spelled out for “everyone,” yet in practice those rules are enforced very flexibly for white people or men, but rigidly for people of color or women. Writing down group rules explicitly – and holding each other to them – is one way to practice setting equitable, transparent standards for engagement.

  2. Inclusion requires power-shifting agreements: In a conversation among people whose voices are usually at the center of a conversation and people whose perspectives and voices are often marginalized, we may need to shift how power is used so that we can work together equitably. Such agreements might include:

    • Step up. Step back. Listen up.

    • Everyone in the circle gets to speak without reaction or response.

    • Name power differences explicitly.

    • Say what you need. (“Speak louder, I can’t hear” or “We need a caucus!”)

    • Ask about intentions; attend to impacts.

    • Ask clarifying questions before advocating.

    • Clearly state any decision we are making, and how it is being made.

  3. Inclusion is about mutual accountability. Building Working Agreements is different from imposing a set of Group Rules. Co-creating a list of behaviors you need so that we can work well together is a chance to practice inclusion instead of demanding assimilation. Holding each other accountable to those agreements in real time – “I have just heard five comments from senior managers with decision-making power. I’d like to hear more from my colleagues on the front line” – is how we live up to our beliefs that we are smarter together, and that diverse voices really matter.