New Voice in the Nonprofit Sector

Rosetta Thurman from Perspectives from the Pipeline is a nonprofit blogger that I admire. She has a great post about taking on stretch assignments to prepare yourself for future leadership opportunities. From Rosetta:

During last week's panel on African American Nonprofit Leadership, Patrick Corvington from the Annie E. Casey Foundation suggested that there were two foolproof ways for next generation leaders to get dream jobs and develop leadership in the nonprofit sector: 1) Networking and 2) The "Stretch Assignment". People talk about networking to death, so we'll focus on Patrick's second idea for a moment. Patrick is Senior Associate in the Leadership Development Unit at Annie E. Casey, so if anyone can help young nonprofit leaders find their way in the sector, it's him! To read the rest of the article, click here.

Running with the big dogs

In high school I considered myself quite a track runner, unfortunately that self perception didn't match up to reality. I would always win my heat in sprints but I always ran in the slow heat because my coach thought I was lazy and not fast enough to run in the faster heats. I would think I did a great job in the 200 yard dash , beating the competition by 2 or 3 strides but when my time was compared to the faster heats I would never even place in the top 6, re-enforcing my coach's belief that I stunk. During the city finals I was lining up with my (slow) heat when the fastest girl on my team started to chicken out about running in the fast heat. She was afraid that she would get beaten in front of everyone. I offered to give her my spot and she happily accepted. Before my coach had a chance to see, I took her spot and ran with the fastest girls in the city. I could hear my coach screaming at the top of his lungs as soon as I left the starting block "what the hell are you doing in the fast heat?!" I saw how fast the girls were running and as they started pulling ahead of me I found a strength from within and ran faster than I even had before. I ended up getting second in the heat (I swear the first place winner had legs that can only come from steroid use).

What does this have to do with your career in philanthropy?

1. When an opportunity for you to reach beyond your comfort zone and ability level comes, take it. I never would have done so well in the race if I had stayed where I was supposed to and the same can be said about my career in philanthropy. Popular wisdom says that I should have waited another 10 years until I was "fully prepared" to begin looking for a job in philanthropy but an opportunity in the field presented itself and I decided to swallow my fear and go for it.
2. Run against the best. Running with the slow heats made me lazy and complacent because I knew I was faster than my immediate competition. I wasn't doing my best because I didn't have the best to compare myself to. Are you the most successful person in your personal or professional network? Then you need to expand your network to include some of the best so that you rise to the challenge.
3. Second place is OK. A fairy tale ended would have been me winning the race and getting carried off by my teammates, in reality I was eating the dust of Miss McGwire and getting yelled at by my coach. Despite this I was happy because I knew I did my best and was challenging myself to the limit. You may not always win in the work you are trying to accomplish at your foundations and in the community but as long as you are doing what is truly your best, you can't go wrong.

P.S. I won't have a Thursday post this week because I will be in lovely Bermuda at a conference on issues facing black men and boys. I'll give you an update on that important topic next week.

Managing your professional identity

How are you managing your professional image? You are all bright young people so you already know to pull down those inappropriate college photos from your Myspace account (or never put them there in the first place since there are many websites that can look at old versions of websites). But let's focus on the future, how are you proactively managing how people perceive you in person, through the web, and through other means of communications like your blog, newspaper articles where you are quoted, or other writing that you do? Here are some quick tips for improving the ways that you market yourself, conciously and subconciously.

In person

• What do people think of you based on your appearance? Do you look like an up and coming in executive or do you look like someone on their way to freshman English? Maybe it's time to get professional help. People have been telling me for years that clothes come in colors besides brown and cream. I didn't truly believe them until I had a professional shopper hold my hand and walk me through a department store and make me purchase a red jacket. Professional shoppers can cost anywhere between $25-50 an hour and many have a special rate for initial consultations. You can also get free help if you ask for a personal shopper to assist you at department store. This is an important investment in yourself since people often make first judgments based on appearance and being young in the field isn't always looked at as a positive characteristic.
• How do you describe to people what to do? There is of fun tool that helps you create 15 seconds elevator pitch about what to do. This tool is worth it's weight in gold if it can help me explain to my family that I really do have a job where I give away money but, no I can't give them in them any. Try out the pitch wizard here.

On the web

• If you haven't already (you know that you have), Google yourself. If you aren't coming up on the first page, you've got some work to do (unless your name is Robert Johnson, then you are just out of luck). The searches that people do of you give a picture of who you are and you need to manage that well. If the first result for your name is a picture of you at a frat party that your friend has on their website, ask them nicely to pull it down and bribe them if you have to.

Other places

• A blog is a great way to help people get to know who you are professionally and what you stand for. Make sure that the things that you put on a blog are things that you are willing to say in front of your organization's board of directors and your boss, otherwise keep it to yourself.
• Being quoted for an article or on a news show can be a good boost to your credibility in the field but make sure that you are properly quoted and are managing your messages well. Nothing is worse than seeing your quote out of context and having to pull yourself out of the hole that you have dug. Ask reporters to show you a copy of the article before it goes to print, so that you can make sure that you aren't being misrepresented. If you are on camera, make sure that you have 2-3 main points that you are trying to get across. That way you don't become flustered and end up saying something that your regret later.

Tools You Can Use- Batching Tasks

I feel like I can do a better job in the community if I am spending less time at my desk, so I am always on the look-out for new ideas and techniques for doing this. Batching tasks is my new favorite technique. I first heard about batching in David Allen's Getting Things Done book. By doing related tasks at the same time you improve efficiency and give your brain a chance to focus. I have heard that it takes the brain 6 minutes to move from one type of tasks to another and researchers have measured a 20-30% loss in the total time it took for subjects to complete two separate problems, when they switched back and forth mentally between the tasks. So think of all the time you are wasting every day switching from site visits, to grantee calls, to report writing. Your brain never has a chance to catch up. The easiest and most effective task to batch is the dreaded emails. If you have a little noise that sounds every time you have an new email or worse yet, your Blackberry goes off when you have a new message, shut off those reminders now. Consciously chose when you will read and reply to emails, so that you can be effective and not interrupt the rest of the tasks of your day because of the "urgent" things in your inbox. I have found that 2-3 times a day works best for me, so that I am still responsive but get other things done. Other tasks that can be batched are:

• Site visits,
• informational calls from grantees (i.e. schedule them all on Thursday afternoons),
• writing,
• community relations activities, and
• educational or networking opportunities.

What other tasks have you batched and what are the downsides to batching?

The Public Relations Problem of Gen X

So there has been a lot of research on this so-called “leadership gap.” We know that the workforce is getting older and if passed experiences are any indicator we now that baby boomers are going to begin to retire in large numbers from the non-profit sector. If we know this, why hasn’t the non-profit sector responded like the private sector by offering
intensive mentoring programs, and other leadership development experiences that will ensure that the leadership torch is passed?

Why is it that so many young people are spending 40 hours a week on repetitive, mind-numbing tasks, that aren’t so much building future leadership skills as they are filling time?

One of the reasons this hasn’t happened, is because of something that could be called a public relations problem of generation x and generation y. Our generations are thought of as lazy, disconnected, and not very loyal. People think this because connection looks differently than it did thirty years ago and generation x and to generation y are different type of employee than baby boomers. We think of themselves more as free agents than life long employees but are willing to work smarter, faster, and better than any previous generation because of our focus on finding new solutions to old problems.

Any suggestions for fixing this PR problem?