Leading Your Nonprofit Into the New Year
Five Sources of Fuel for Your Journey
How can you sustain the positivity that you might have started the new year with? How can you maintain that feeling that your most prized goals are within your grasp - that they are achievable?
Three weeks into the new year is often the time when the initial positive start to the year begins to tarnish, so here are five ways in which you can add fuel to your journey.
Aspirations: Give aspirational thinking at least as much attention as you give to New Year’s resolutions. Aspirational thinking generates positivity, creativity, and optimism which mere resolutions tend not to have. Aspirational thinking is a fuel source in itself. It triggers a sense of becoming which, as with positive psychology, has all sorts of associated benefits. Focusing on aspirations is a key element of The Nonprofit Strategy Group’s approach to organizational development. It helps conceptualize the best possible future for an organization, as well as the energy to pursue that future.
Teamwork: Delegation is one key element of teamwork. Quite simply, you should not have to be doing (or feeling that you have to do) everything. Delegation is a leadership skill that many Executive Directors struggle with. Clearly identifying the roles and responsibilities of staff, the board, and volunteers is the first step to successful delegation. And when your team members know what their roles are and what is expected from them, teamwork is enhanced as is organizational performance. The Nonprofit Strategy Group excels at helping organizations achieve alignment by clarifying roles and expectations.
Seek Support: Being an Executive Director (or a board president) is an unusually lonely role. In one way you know everybody, but in another, you stand alone in your leadership role because there is no peer within the organization that you can debrief with and gain support free of any power dynamic. This leads to stress and burnout. Seeking support from other Executive Directors is a highly effective way to gain such important peer support. This is why The Nonprofit Strategy Group facilitates monthly Leader’s Circles for Executive Directors.
Self-Care: All of these ideas contain an element of self-care, but this also deserves a category of its own. Several factors contribute to the need for self-care in nonprofit leadership positions including the gravity of the mission and secondary trauma; the pressure to achieve so much, often with such limited resources; the unpredictable nature of securing revenue; and the high expectations of so many people. Self-care is a critically important source of fuel to support your preferred journey. The Nonprofit Strategy Group works with partners who provide effective self-care strategies for use individually and/or with your team.
Celebrate Success: Whatever urgent issues might arise throughout the year, none are as important as the celebration of success. Celebrating success at every board or staff meeting, with donors, clients, and other constituents is vital. Nonprofit organizations are set up to create change, and each success story - large or small - should be celebrated as a team. Celebrating success in this way will fuel the creation of a positive and healthy organizational culture which becomes its own motivating power.
The Nonprofit Strategy Group offers free consultation sessions for Executive Directors or Board Presidents who are seeking ways to fuel the work of their organizations. Our approach to supporting nonprofit organizations is rooted in our own organizational values which are:
Strengths-Based: we will work with you to discover the drivers of success and help you build upon those
Based on Partnership: we emphasize your expertise and perspectives and offer our own expertise and perspectives to co-create the future
Community-Driven: We are motivated by our desire to affect positive change in the community. This is why we choose to work with nonprofit organizations.
Book a free consultation session with us today. We’d welcome the opportunity to see how we can help. https://www.thenonprofitstrategygroup.com/