Fundraising Leadership ™

Executive Coaching, Leadership Training, and Personal Development

Great Leadership Means Less Doing, More Being

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[This post is an excerpt from the book Leading Beyond Change by Michael K Sahota and Audree Tara Sahota]

Many leaders hold the false belief that all we have to do to create success is to learn the right model, concept, skill, or technique. The basic premise is that we are fine and that new information or training will help create the success and impact that we want.

In this mindset, we see people (including ourselves) as black boxes where we don’t need to concern ourselves with what is inside the box. We can create success by focusing on the boundary of the box: the actions or doing. 

When we examine the ways of business-as-usual, they are almost entirely about external measurable actions and behaviors. The whole of the human experience is relegated to the rational, logical, and measurable.

The trap of traditional organizations and leadership is to focus on the external aspects of action and doing. It’s rather a waste of time since we are trying to fix the external effects rather than the inner causes. For example, the surface-level external problem of responding angrily to an email is ultimately caused by the internal challenges with emotional regulation and conditioned behavior patterns. Addressing challenges at the surface level will only lead to temporary superficial change. [Read more…]

Beyond Perception: Unmasking Wholeness in Diversity

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What is it that defines our innate humanity? 

Growing up with what many would consider severe Cerebral Palsy, great emphasis and attention was placed on my speech, or more precisely, how to make my speech understandable to others. 

This was a perspective taken by many of my doctors, therapists, teachers, and even parents. But nothing catalyzed this purview on life more than an admonishment by my first martial arts teacher after earning my black belt in Budo Taijustu.

“You must be clear and understandable to others if you want to be successful in this world,” he insisted.

As a college student in my early twenties, I had already spent years in pursuit of transforming my voice from what others often perceived a spastic set of disharmonic tones into a cohesive, crisp, and “normalized” pattern of speech. 

It was as if my manifestation of language was somehow incorrect and, simultaneously, it was my sole responsibility to transform it into a format that was understandable to others. Only years later did I realize that my persistent effort toward striving to fit in was ultimately the same effort that not only minimized my humanity but undermined my natural capacity to support others in their own learning. [Read more…]

Bringing Indigenous Protocols to Your Organization

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Birds flying against a blue and orange sky

Have you asked yourself what reconciliation means to you? What does it mean to your organization? Your family? For many, reconciliation has a deeply personal meaning, borne from our own history and knowledge.

I am a professional fundraiser and, in the fall of 2021, I opened a virtual fundraising school called The New School of Fundraising. It was very important to me to consider how my school could participate in the reconciliation movement that is happening within Canada but my drive for that came from a deeply personal connection.  

My Grandmother attended residential school from the age of three until she was eighteen. She did not leave at all during that time. I once read an excerpt from an interview where she spoke about watching the birds outside and wishing that she had wings so that she could fly away. The only thing is that even if she had wings, she had nowhere to fly to, nowhere to go.  She spoke very little of those years and our family always respected her privacy and wishes.

As a result of the extended time that my Grandmother spent in residential school my family had absolutely no connection to our culture, everything had been lost. It has taken me a long time to realize and fully appreciate what has been lost to myself and my family. I have spoken a lot about my own journey of “finding my way home” and as such, created a workshop for the school, titled Indigenous Protocols for Fundraisers, that would help myself and others on the journey. [Read more…]

2021 Year-End Thoughts and Musings: What Just Happened?

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Brought to you by the Fundraising Leadership Team  

Photo collage of the Fundraising Leadership team members

Margaret: Can We Stop Talking About “The New Normal”, And Try Instead To “Live in Liminal”?

Last month, I celebrated the American Thanksgiving with my two sons and one of their friends. Since the end of my marriage two years ago, I have been deeply resistant to holidays. Ours is a family that loved and valued traditions – and I couldn’t quite let go of the tradition of the four of us all being at the table. So, for the past two years, we’ve found a way to combine forces.

This has had the positive effect of no one needing to have a major holiday without our sons. However, as anyone who’s ever had a relationship end also knows, it’s had many tick marks in the “negative” column, too.  My kids have reported – with accuracy – that it has felt tense and awkward. One of my sons even said it felt like there was something decaying in the room – the decomposing space of a marriage that hadn’t been allowed to burn fully to ash so that something new might (or might not) be possible.

This year, my ex-husband wisely said: let’s not. And he resourced himself with other family members, and I got to spend the day cooking and enjoying a meal of gratitude with my grown sons.

And I realized, the morning after Thanksgiving, as I finished putting away the wine glasses and reflected on a great night, what I had been missing out on by holding onto the comfort and familiar of what’s now the old. We had a lovely night, in which I got treated to my sons’ culinary talents and adventure (deep fried turkey!), as well as a way we danced together during cooking and cleaning that was as delightful as it was oddly unexpected. This is a new way my family looked this year, and even though it is likely to change without notice, I loved it. And I have taken years to be open to this delightful new version. [Read more…]

Adults, STOP telling kids what to do!

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On October 18, 2018 I received the most frightening email of my professional leadership coaching career.

Maybe I should back up a little… 

Just one month before receiving the aforementioned email, I led my first Executive Function Coach training for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Knowing that Executive Function, which involves planning, prioritizing, impulse control, and other high-level forms of cognition, is a key predictor of life success, for the past 12 years the Edge Foundation has gone into school districts around the country, training adults to coach young people to maximize their personal and professional potential. The 12-hour experiential training is made up of parents, teachers, staff and volunteers who are committed to improving the lives of young people who struggle with various conditions ranging from ADHD, Advance Childhood Experiences (ACES), various learning disabilities and issues of displacement from stable housing/food insecurities to name a few. As a result of this training, these staff/volunteers then coach at least one student every week, for 20 minutes. [Read more…]

Choosing a Stand Over a Position

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compass

Having an agreed understanding of what a word means – a distinction – enables us to have different conversations, which can enable us to achieve better results. For example, back in 2019 relatively few people knew what a Zoom call was. Today, millions of us share that distinction.

One distinction I have found particularly helpful is the difference between a position and a stand.

A position is against something – a negative reaction to something we don’t agree with. We hear about this a lot these days in politics, in the news, and especially on social media. That’s largely because it’s relatively easy to say what we don’t agree with, to object to an idea or another person’s view. We can find ourselves triggered when we hear or read a comment we particularly don’t like. We experience a feeling that comes from somewhere deep inside, which seems to rise up from the stomach. But the very existence of a position depends on its counter-position. In other words, take that counter-position away and our position can no longer survive. [Read more…]

When it’s Time to Go – Firing Crummy Board Members

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We’ve come a long way. Surviving the challenges of 2020 was difficult. Many nonprofits folded or were drastically injured. Some boards were frozen and lackluster in responding to the crisis we all endured. Poor performance in times of adversity will have long-lasting effects that may take years to repair, so firing crummy nonprofit board members can become necessary.

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Diversifying and Democratizing Fundraising: A Call to Action for Leaders

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A photo of the tips of coloured pencils

To say it has been a challenging few years in North America, is truly an understatement. The pandemics of COVID-19 along with racism have impacted us all, though not equitably. These pandemics have touched and changed all aspects of our private and professional lives, and the fundraising sector has not been immune to the changes foisted upon us. A sector synonymous with helping, has been forced to reckon with the cultural norms and values that have long been accepted and recognize these are not inclusive, in some cases are harmful, and have been designed and enacted on the same foundations of privilege and oppression that plague all other institutions in our society. Many nonprofits and charities were paralytic in their response to the racial justice uprisings across the continent, others took a watch and wait approach, and some accepted the notion that their response may be imperfect but were comfortable with the idea of potential failure in lieu of not being responsive. 

Many nonprofits and charities have indeed been founded or evolved to respond to intractable social challenges that are compounded by race, gender expression, sexual orientation, disability, and other intersectional identities. The response to, and in some case non-response to the pandemics as it pertains to program delivery and fundraising has been a matter of mission fulfillment and survival; however, all nonprofit organizations have had to consider how the inequities that are borne in almost all institutions in Western society impact their staff – some see this as the right thing to do and no more, and others see it is imperative to sustainability. While COVID-19 has become a part of our lexicon, so too is the language of EDI – equity, diversity, and inclusion. Sector conversations about pay equity, intersectionality, reconciliation, decolonization, anti-oppression and more that were once part of the sidelines in our sector – seen as the work of interest groups, have now taken center stage.  [Read more…]

Some Pants Are Better To Travel Without

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I want to talk about Traveling Pants – but I don’t mean the same thing as the young adult series of books.  Those were about an actual pair of jeans that miraculously fit four totally differently shaped friends (really, now that I think about it, perhaps these books were magic realism as much as YA fiction) and connected them to each other.  I am talking about a metaphoric pair of pants or jeans that actually might fit one of your friends – but certainly don’t fit you.

Ultimately, some pants are better to travel without.

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Trailblazing a Path

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Rambling Through the Thicket of Professional Callings

One day, I woke up with the realization: This is my life. I asked myself: Am I doing what I love? Am I faithful to my professional callings, personal callings, and family and friends?

For those who may know me, I tend to take most of my energy and place it in one bucket: work. In many ways, this is great. I have gathered a lot of expertise in many areas; I am highly efficient and can be counted on as a valuable contributor and resource in various circumstances. But the real question I recently asked is: Am I doing what I love? And, do I love what I am doing?  Am I trailblazing a path that I set out for myself when I was younger and had envisioned the ‘adult’ version of myself?

[Read more…]