In hiring a CEO for the Nonprofit Leadership Lab, my team and I decided upon a set of skills, attributes, and experiences we felt would be essential for the job.
Many of our initial interviews focused on that criteria. We then dug a bit deeper.
You see, my business isn’t just a business for me. Helping leaders of small nonprofits isn’t just a passion. It is my mission and I needed to know that our first CEO would be aligned with us on this core principle: the work we do is “heart work” and it is “head work”. Values and goals. Feelings and thoughts.
We asked Glennda what felt like a “head” question – we asked her how she would describe her personal brand. She struggled to answer until we reframed the question more simply, “What do you stand for?”
Like oh so many of us, Glennda has learned a great deal from the work of Brené Brown. Brown encourages leaders to think about values and encourages people to take time to reflect upon them and to lean into them every day. Glennda had done this homework and using it, she was able to reconsider the assignment.
Her two core values are posted right on her desk: connection and justice. Perfect for our work, for our clients and members. In her 25-year nonprofit career, she has brought those values to life every day, as a leader in a movement and as a CEO who manages others.
WHAT DO YOU STAND FOR?
It’s an interesting question to ponder during an election year, don’t you think?
Not gonna lie – I wish more of our political leaders engaged in this kind of work. I am often skeptical about our political leaders. I don’t always trust that their positions reflect what is core to them – their values. I would point to this skepticism as a deep foundational flaw in the world of politics that keeps people at home on Election Day. (I’d like to be clear that I am not that skeptical and I did not stay home on Election Day.)
I STAND FOR AUTHENTICITY
One of my core values is authenticity.
I live my life openly, I strive to be in relationships authentically. People know where I stand on things because I speak my mind with authenticity.
I believe a great leader has unwavering core values. These values serve as a kind of compass, a personal moral compass that guides the decisions you make. Without them, you would be rudderless and folks can feel that. You could demonstrate a lack of clarity around WHY you have made the decisions you make and shy away from difficult conversations if your compass is not pointing you to what is deeply true for you.
So what are your values?
And how do you communicate these values? How do you bring them to life in your work as a leader?
After nearly 15 years of writing for nonprofit leaders, I’ve learned that I can’t just leave you with questions. So as you reflect on this rather existential question, I encourage you to consider the following as you lean into your leadership as a board or staff leader at a nonprofit.
DEVELOP 2-5 CORE VALUES
Maybe these are already wildly clear for you. Awesome. Maybe it feels like a worthy exercise. There are three elements to this exercise:
- Time – maybe ½ a day
- A whiteboard and markers
- A trusted friend, a spouse, a sibling – someone who loves you and knows you from tip to toe.
Divide the time in ½ – the first half is to fill the whiteboard with words, values, ideals, whatever feels important to you. Your trusted companion for the exercise can gut check, play devil’s advocate, and see things you don’t see.
Take a break and come back. Start to edit. Combine words that feel like synonyms. Begin to shape them into a non-negotiable list.
I want you to imagine that you are asked during a job interview or in your first all-staff meeting to introduce yourself as a leader and you are asked a simple question. Something like “So, what would you say are the core values that drive you?” Or an open-ended question like “Tell us what you stand for and how you will bring yourself to life in the work you do in our organization?”
That’s the list you are shooting to create on that whiteboard along with some narrative about what led you to these.
PUBLICIZE YOUR VALUES
Staff, board, donors, volunteers – they want to know who you are as a leader. They want to know what it is going to be like to be a part of this ecosystem you lead. Sure they want to know if you are going to be hands-on, a tough boss, a facilitative leader, or a good listener.
But they really want to know who you are as a leader. What drives you? What are your core values? This will help them to really know you and to be able to have certain expectations about how you operate.
3 STEPS TO STAND UP
1 – SURFACE COMMONALITIES
You have looked inward at your own values and you have shared them with your organization. The next step is to consider these values in the context of the mission of your work. Perhaps you bring your senior team together and build out the organizational values in the context of your own. I guarantee that the values will be enhanced, fleshed out, enriched, and turned into a list that builds on and deepens the values you yourself hold dear. This will allow you to be present in your work and see when things are off-kilter.
The other day, Glennda, the leader of our Nonprofit Leadership Lab, had an “aha” moment. She said to her team, “When we bring experts into the Lab to share insights with our thousands of members, we must be careful that their values align with ours.” I agreed. She continued, “We have to be careful because our members are precious.”
She understands that having over 6,500 leaders from around the world in our community is an awesome responsibility and each of them must be treated with respect, compassion, and care.
In that understanding rests a core value.
2 – EVALUATE YOUR STAFF
Add these values to the template for your annual staff evaluation. As part of each staff member’s self-evaluation, they should rate themselves against these values, offering specific examples of where they have brought these values to life.
Note: This kind of self-examination is the antidote for staff members who meet their performance goals and have stellar reviews but they are toxic colleagues.
Members of the organization (yourself included) need to be accountable to the values and not simply to the goals.
3 – INTEGRATE VALUES
Embed the values into the budget process. You might think this is a weedy step but stay with me. A budget is a roadmap to goals and strategy. Decisions, especially hard ones, need to be made during the design of an annual budget.
A client asked me to help create guidelines for these decisions, so everyone understands and agrees on the reasons for any increases or decreases. I thought that this was a most excellent question and it fit right into the development and articulation of values. Perhaps “pay equity” is one of the five guardrails. Come up with these guardrails and be sure they align with the organizational values.
This is where you put everything together.
LET YOUR VALUES BE YOUR COMPASS
Before you apply for the job, dig deep into the origin story of the organization. What was the organization’s “why”? What were the values that served to underpin the beginnings?
Ask yourself a simple question: do the organization’s values align with mine?
If so, you may have found your dream job. Make it explicit during your interview how and why your values align with the organization. As the next leader of the organization, the search committee will want to know that you are the right person to be handed the ‘baton’.
As you journey through your tenure, continue to pressure test your values with those of the organization. When organizations stray from the mission, more often than not, it is because they stray from what are central and core values of the origin story.
Let me close where I began. We should know what leaders stand for. Far too often, we don’t. As a board or staff leader of a nonprofit organization with a mission and an origin story that is infused with certain values, you owe it to yourself, to the entire organizational ecosystem, and to the communities you serve to be true to what you stand for and to show it (and not just tell it) through the culture you build and in the work you do.
Regardless of the footprint of your work or the size of your budget, the world is counting on you to be the kind of leader we are hungry for.
