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.
Requests are powerful tools for making things happen, and we often avoid them in our hyper-individualistic culture. Yet, to expand our impact, we must enroll others. When we make effective requests, expectations get clarified, needs get met and thus the objective and relational aspects of our work are improved.
CNN reported that Hillary Clinton took 54% of Millennial voters and that 37% of Millennials voted for Donald Trump. In 2008, Barack Obama won 66% of the Millennial vote and in 2012, Barack Obama won 60% of the Millennial vote.
You’ll notice that Millennials were less liberal in 2016 than they were in 2012, and even less so than in 2008.
Are Millennials shedding their liberal values? Have Millennials given up on hope of positive change after eight years of Obama-filled with gridlock and some serious liberal letdowns?
To engage your stakeholders, you must first ignite their imaginations, which will increase their participation, which will foster their commitment to your shared work and the desired results. These three pillars of engagement are broad, so to help ground these concepts in practice, I am excited to share with you the following list of ways to ignite your stakeholders’ imaginations and get you moving down the road to meaningful engagement.
We are at a time when we face many challenges and stakeholders are increasingly polarized in their thoughts on how to solve the issues at hand. This makes engaging certain stakeholders even more difficult. This is why we need become more creative in how we engage each other - our colleagues and our peers across “the aisle.”
Generational stereotypes abound, leading us to believe Millennials are entitled, boomers are tech-phobic, and so on. Yet, these stereotypes, just like generalities about race or religion, limit our thinking. Whether conscious or unconscious, the biases that stereotypes perpetuate lie somewhere between inaccurate to extremely harmful
American culture supports & rewards the analytical left-brain thinking; yet it is in the right brain where the magic happens. We can logically think through problems with our left-brain, but how often do we become blocked or stuck on an issue? Or, how often do our solutions actually solve the problem as we intended without creating new problems?
It’s been said that creativity is the survival skill of the 21st century, -- creativity is the multiplier of intelligence and it sharpens our competitive edge. In this day and age, everyone must learn how to be a better problem solver. And this is vitally important because, after all, aren’t we all paid to solve problems?
Just as vital as clear goals are for teams to perform, are quality relationships between team members. People working together well need to respect one another, trust each other and feel seen by their colleagues. Recent studies have shown that the most effective teams exhibit the following behaviors:
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.
