True inclusivity demands more than open doors; it requires the courage to delve into the complexity and intensity that diversity and divergence ignite.
This Thanksgiving, I thank all my teachers. Thank you for being my guiding lights, wise sages, and enthusiastic cheerleaders. Your impact is immeasurable, and your presence in my life is a gift I deeply cherish.
As philanthropic and nonprofit leaders, we are committed to a living our purpose, and driving societal impact. It's time we align our strategies and lofty ambitions with the realities we face. We can shine under the mounting pressures. Remember, diamonds are just specks of carbon that handle stress well.
By regularly assessing collaboration, organizations can pinpoint areas of improvement to support their evolution towards a more aligned, inclusive, innovative, and impactful culture.
Who is responsible for what? If a team member doesn’t perform, what happens? How do our distinct roles play together in pursuit of our shared goal? Who holds the authority here? If the Warriors didn’t know who to look to when calling the plays, why certain skilled players sat on the bench while others got to start and how they could leverage their individual skills, collectively, this season would have looked a a lot different.
Networking, that essential business skill, is undergoing a makeover.
Instead of corporate happy hours and awkward special events in hotel lobbies, workshops, co-working and collaborative events are bringing folks together, with creativity and casual fun along the way.
When people talk about engagement some people are talking about employee well-being, others are talking about motivation, others are talking about loyalty, others are talking about attendance, others are talking about donations, and others are talking about something else!
I recently had the opportunity to lead a series of communications workshops. Together we explored conflict styles, giving feedback, having difficult conversations, individual and organizational communication patterns and how to improve the teams’ ability to work together given the various styles and stressors of my clients’’ workplaces. While the workshops were very well received, I realized that almost all of the philosophies and activities I designed and facilitated revolved around “I” statements. This is only half of the equation...
Many organizations are launching new strategic planning efforts. Some have resources, others do not. To support the strategic planning efforts of your organization I have interviewed a strategic planning guru, Jonathan Kaufman, and wanted to share his insights and strategies below.
Jonathan Kaufman is co-founder & Principal of Third Plateau Social Impact Strategies. In this role, Jonathan collaborates with nonprofits and social entrepreneurs all over the world, helping them expand and deepen their impact. He specializes in business and strategic planning, metrics development, community and millennial engagement, and impact assessment for a wide array of Third Plateau’s clients.
Engagement is the hot new buzzword and organizational riddle. How do we engage our employees as well as other stakeholders? Frequently, we see the engagement conundrum in the context of Millennials. With much of my consulting work focused on helping organizations engage constituents and stakeholders, I find that the nexus between engagement and 21st Century organizations overwhelmingly overlap.
The “Five Year Strategic Plan” is obsolete, thanks to the frenetic pace of change that demands unprecedented organizational spontaneity and flexibility to stay ahead of the game.
As a consultant who supports organizations in developing and implementing their strategic plans, I work with different planning methods given the adaptive nature of organizations and issues they work to solve.
“The world is too complex and interdependent and rapidly changing for us to be able to reason through everything that is going on. We can no longer rely only on making sense of the whole of what is going on: we also have to sense it. This requires us to access a deeper, non-rational, more ancient kind of knowing." - Adam Kahane
I increasingly find our detachment from one another, from the present moment, from our ability to focus on our surroundings frightening. We are all very busy thanks to the hyper-connectivity we enjoy, but are we deeply happy? I am led to believe that all these great devices distractions are making us less connected not only to one another, but even more distressing, to ourselves. We are moving in the wrong direction, away from compassion, happiness, from human-to-human connection. These are traits that humans are uniquely suited to exploit. Furthermore, these are traits that our world desperately needs right now.
Thank goodness we have choices.
Einstein said, “Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them.” In other words, to solve our problems we need new questions, big questions, small questions - different questions. As our nation debates, once again, the best way to stem gun violence, reduce bipartisanship, improve immigration policies, protect women’s rights, and much more, we seem to be stuck, again, asking the wrong questions and coming up with lame solutions. What is made possible when we ask the right questions?
Are you as sick of these generational stereotypes we have been reading ad nausea over the past decade as I am? What more do we need to know about Boomers retiring, and not retiring? Are there really any other Millennial engagement or retention strategies to be discussed?
