Nonprofit Hub Radio
Whether starting a nonprofit or taking an existing cause to the next level, The Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast is about breaking down how nonprofits can grow. Each episode features an interview with a sector star with insight, stories, or ideas that can take your nonprofit from good to excellence. Join host Meghan Speer every week to make your good go further!
Nonprofit Hub Radio
Embracing Uncertainty: A New Approach to Leadership
What if leadership isn't about having all the answers? Discover the power of embracing uncertainty with our special guest, Lisa Slayton, a former nonprofit leader who now thrives as a consultant and author. Join us as Lisa recounts her transformative journey from heading the a local Pittsburgh nonprofit to co-authoring "Life in Flux" with Michaela O'Donnell.
In this eye-opening episode, we challenge conventional problem-solving approaches by exploring the concept of "embracing the unfigureoutable." Lisa and I talk about the shift from solving problems to fostering curiosity, especially when facing complex, unsolvable issues. Embrace your vulnerabilities and learn why admitting "I don't know" can be a strength, leading to innovation and growth. With the metaphor of a trapeze artist as our guide, we discuss the leaps of faith required to unlearn outdated practices and navigate the ever-changing landscape of leadership. Tune in for practical wisdom and inspiration that will resonate with leaders across all fields.
Lisa Pratt Slayton is the founder and CEO of Tamim Partners. She partners with leaders and their teams to help them flourish and lead well in complex times. With 25 years of leadership, organizational consulting and coaching experience, her clients include business executives and non-profit and ministry leaders.
Get free nonprofit professional development resources, connections to cause work peers, and more at https://nonprofithub.org
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Speaker 2:Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub Podcast. I'm your host, megan Spear, and joining me today is my friend, lisa Slayton, whose new book Life in Flux just came out, and I'm so excited for some of the lessons that are in here for her to share with you all. So, lisa, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Megan. It's a delight to be here and nice to meet you all, you great nonprofit leaders out there. I was one of you.
Speaker 2:As you say. So, lisa, when I first met you, you were a nonprofit leader here in the Pittsburgh area, so can I introduce yourself to our audience about your background in nonprofit and where you are in that journey?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I went to work in the early 2000s for an organization in Pittsburgh called the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation. The mission of PLF was to equip Christian leaders to lead in their various contexts, and most of the contexts initially that we were serving leaders to lead in their various contexts and most of the contexts initially that we were serving leaders around were in the nonprofit space, in the ministry space, if you want to call it that, and in the urban environment. Over time, we developed a cohort program called the Leaders Collaborative and we ended up working in that context with a lot of entrepreneurs and so organizations in startup mode or early growth mode, we'll put it that way and over time, having worked with those leaders in the cohort program, many of them then came to us and said okay, come help us build our teams and capacity around leadership and relational health and organizational health. So we started to do some consulting work as well and individual coaching around what I call vocational stewardship, which we can unpack, and I was at PLF from 2005 until 2019. The last seven years I was there, I was the CEO, took over in a bit of a crisis so I have a little of that experience in my history and then left in 2019 to start my own consulting practice. What I realized was that I actually liked doing the work with individuals and teams a little more than I liked being a CEO, and I was tired. Seven years of a nonprofit leadership position it's just for all of you out there it's a lot of work. So for the last five years, I've been doing a lot of individual, what I call deep dive vocational work and organizational and team development in a number of different contexts business, nonprofit and with some churches and pastors and that's what led me to the space where, about four or five years ago, I met my co-author for Life in Flux, michaela O'Donnell.
Speaker 3:Michaela herself is a non-profit leader. She runs the Max DePriest Center for Leadership that's based out of Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. She's a brilliant communicator and researcher. She's a practical theologian by training and she had called me one day and said she had written a book that came out in the fall of 2021 called Make Work Matter and had done very well, and she had a contract for two books. And she said I think I want to write my next book around helping people navigate change.
Speaker 3:And we started a conversation around that and as we got into the conversation. At one point I just looked at her and said you're going to write that book, I want to write it with you. Said you're going to write that book, I want to write it with you. And she was like, oh okay, well, let me think about that. And she came back and we had a series of discussions and we did some experiments of writing together and determined that we could probably develop a very good book, a book that would be better than either of us could write individually. And so the collaboration started about two and a half years ago, and just a couple of weeks ago the book got birthed into the world. It's a very strange experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've said this before, but when I launched my book back in 2021, the day before it came out I had a total meltdown and my best friend was like what is wrong? And I was like people are going to read it.
Speaker 2:And she was like I thought that was the point. Isn't that why you did all of this? I was like, yeah, but it's so personal, it never occurred to me that people were actually going to read it. And then, all of a sudden, you're like, oh man, yeah, here we go. It is a surreal experience. It feels vulnerable, doesn't it?
Speaker 3:Yes, very much so it feels like you're exposing yourself because you're putting something out in the world, and we've had some early readers who have given it positive feedback, so that's encouraging. But those are people who know us and love us and so now it goes out into the world. It will be interesting to see how a much bigger audience hopefully responds to it and where they find it helpful and what resonates with people. What I think is going to resonate with people is probably going to be different than what people actually land on. So yeah, so it's been a very fun and good, hard process.
Speaker 3:Collaboration, in particular, around writing, and we didn't do a typical co-author writing process. Often, when two people write a book, it's you take these chapters, I'll take these chapters, and one of us will mush them together. And we decided from the beginning that we wanted one writing voice, that we felt like that was going to be important for the book. And Michaela is just a better writer than I am I can do technical writing all day long, but from a storytelling perspective and so we decided my role was I was the plower and she was the braider, and I'd outline chunks and send them to her and she'd start to smooth them together and add content and we'd went back and forth. In some chapters we had 30 or 40 iterations before we felt good about it because it was such a back and forth process. But I think we got a better book. I hope we got a better book out of it. So time will tell.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about that, because I think there's some really great lessons for our audience in it.
Speaker 2:So the book is called Life in Flux, which I think all of us can find ourselves in all the time right we are living in a crazy flux, just culturally, all the time, let alone whatever's happening in people's personal lives or within our organizations lives or within our organizations and as leaders, it can be really hard to understand how to lead well when you feel out of control because everything is going crazy and help guide people through situations like that. So let's talk to those leaders. What are some of your favorite lessons out of the book where you think, oh, I really wish I would have had this knowledge or someone would have told me this when I was sitting in that? Executive director, ceo, chair, back in the day.
Speaker 3:There are a lot of lessons and, to your point, we're living in very disruptive and disorienting times at multiple levels. Mikael and I think about this in terms of the climate right, we have 40,000 feet, we have 10,000 feet, we have close in community and then we have oh my goodness here I am personally. Those are all different levels of disruption that are going on. One of the things that I would say and we write about this extensively in the book is leaders have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and, more importantly, they have to get comfortable with being able to say I don't know.
Speaker 2:Ooh, that's a hard one.
Speaker 3:The people that work with them and for them, the communities they serve through their mission. All of those people are hungry for certitude. I want it to be this or I want it to be this, and it's in the tension of those two things that we learn, we grow and we actually need to get comfortable with operating. From most of the time, it's in the not knowing that what we call liminal space sometimes right, and it doesn't mean that there aren't times when, as a leader, you have to be clear and direct and help people move forward. What we don't have to do is have it all figured out, and the opening story in the book sets the tone for how we think about this. It's a story of my husband when he was a young guy, probably in his teenage years, which would put us in the late 1960s, and he grew up on the coast of Maine in the summers and he and his older brother, from the time they were young teenagers, always had small kind of runabout boats together and that was the activity. They would go out with their friends and go to the islands and all this kind of thing. One day he was out with a couple of his friends and they were pretty far from shore and they were getting ready to turn to come back in, and a thick fog rolled in. Yeah, and if you can just close your eyes for a minute and imagine, all of a sudden you can't see your hand in front of you right Now, what do you do? And one of the primary navigational tools up here and of course this was long before the years of GPS and all of the electronics we have now were the paper charts. If you've ever seen a nautical chart, you know it charts out what the depth is, and on the main coastline there's a lot of rock and ledge, so you have to be very careful navigating around the islands and on the coastline. But of course, in the fog a paper chart does you absolutely no good. Yeah, right, because you can't see, right, and so the move is counterintuitive.
Speaker 3:The move is and Roger did this after he had a moment of pure panic right, he had two friends, but he'd been on the water enough and he said okay, and what you do is, it's very counterintuitive, because what you want to do is put the boat in gear and go forward and just get out of it. But you can't. And so he stopped, cut the engine and then listened, and he instructed his two buddies to do the same thing. Well, now, what are they listening for? Well, if you've ever spent any time on a coastline, you know that there are audible markers that tell you where you are, in the form of foghorns and bell buoys and the sound of other boats right, the engines of other boats. And that's what they're listening for.
Speaker 3:And so the move is the stop, cut the engine and listen. Okay, I'm hearing X foghorn, let's move in that direction. And you make a small incremental move and then you stop and do the same thing again, and it's kind of repeat. So it's the small incremental moves over time that slowly gets you closer to where you want to be. It's not a put the boat in gear and put your head down and hope for the best as you run into a walk To your point is everyone's natural reaction.
Speaker 2:That's right. Our natural inclination is to just power through head down. Do what I got to do, keep going Right White, knuckle it we want to white knuckle it, and we talk about that in the book.
Speaker 3:We phrase these as what the common posture is versus the uncommon posture, as you're navigating through times of change and disruption, and the common posture is to white knuckle it. Right, just put your head down and go on through the uncommon posture. That actually will help you get where you want to go, and sometimes you don't even know where you're going, right? You've got to make course corrections along the way. Is this slow down, stop, pause and then make a small move and continue to do that, and from a leadership perspective that feels not grand and dramatic enough sometimes. Right, we should have all the answers.
Speaker 3:And here's the North Star we're shooting for, and it doesn't mean that you rethink your mission necessarily, or the purpose of your organization, but there can be lots of ways to accomplish that mission, right. And so how do we learn in the midst of disruption and change, everything being up in the air, as you phrased it before, we jumped on the air? Sometimes we just have to stop and slow down and pay attention and push the pause button and have everyone lean in and listen. What are we seeing, what are we hearing, what are we learning? And then how do we make a small move out of that? And that's really the heart of the whole book, and we designed eight navigational skills to guide you and ground you through this process, and we can unpack a couple of those if you'd like. But this can be true for the individual in their own growth journey. It certainly is true for leaders for themselves as well as for the organizations that they're leading.
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Speaker 2:I think that one of the breakdowns in it I'm not sure if it's just a chapter title or one of those navigational skills, but I saw on the chapter titles one that really struck me is embrace the unfigureoutable, which is hard to say, it's a mouthful the unfiguroutable, which is a great word, by the way. I love it. I think for me that's at least as I was looking through the outline that's maybe the hardest one, because surely there's an answer. But I think about some of these nonprofits especially who are trying to take on massive problems in the world. Right, I was talking to a nonprofit leader the other day who was very discouraged. They're seeing, for every good that they do, for every piece that they impact, 17 more things are falling apart. It's just this ongoing battle, and so let's dig into that one Sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So we went back and forth with our editor about the word unfigurable and we I love it. We hung tough on keeping it.
Speaker 2:Yes, I love it.
Speaker 3:And because that's what it feels like right, and I think the work, megan, and the way we describe it in the book is as I recognize. I don't actually know what to do. I shift from problem solving to curiosity.
Speaker 2:Ooh, say that again.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So as I recognize I don't actually know what to do, I shift from problem solving to curiosity, to curiosity. I love that, yeah, and what I have found in my own leadership journey and as I coach and consult with lots of organizations the more time you've spent in a leadership role, the more you've bought into what I would call a dysfunctional belief, which is I have to have all the answers. And my problem-solving skills are so well-developed that if you give me a problem, I know how to fix it. I know how to solve it and I think problem-solving remains an important part of leadership.
Speaker 3:Please don't hear that I'm dismissing problem solving. There are problems that we must be part of, you know, we must absolutely pursue and that are solvable. But there's a space, increasingly in organizational life, which I put in the category of complexity versus complicated, and in the complex space it requires a very different kind of leadership posture. So we have to move away from this. I know the answer. I can just architect it through and get to the answer I need, and the shift is to step back and say, well, I'm not sure.
Speaker 3:Let's get curious, let's see what we can learn, let's talk to people. If you're leading a team of people. You need to deploy your people into this too, because they have lots of insight, more in high touch with your actual stakeholders, the people that you're serving, and they may know more than you do, and so we have to invoke the curiosity and say what are you seeing, what are you learning? It's being on the boat Cut the engine and pause and listen. So we go into listen and learn mode, which feels slow and messy and uncomfortable, and it's the place that presents us often with the largest opportunities we have for ourselves and for our organizations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, and it's also super vulnerable yeah, right, right Because you've been put into this role and the mindset tends to be I've got to power through, everyone's looking to me and there's some pressure that comes along with that. So the vulnerability to say, you know what? Yeah, I don't know. That is, I think, a big challenge for leaders across the board.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's right and I think if I had to say I often get asked like what's the most important thing leaders can be learning these days I think it's that to have the courage to say I don't know, to put themselves in those vulnerable places so that they can go into learning mode big fan of. He's an organizational psychologist and he wrote a book that came out a couple years ago now, I guess, called Think Again. Right, how do we learn? Unlearn and relearn, and that's a big part of this journey. We have to unlearn things Before you embrace the unfiguratable. You often have to let go of things that you're very attached to and that's a whole nother. I believe this. I've believed it for so long. It feels like a stake I have in the ground and yet my belief is no longer functioning and I have to let go of it. But we don't yet know what's coming. So we have to step into that space of the unfigurable.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think you've touched on a key point the willingness to let go. Yeah, oh, yeah, right, because that is terrifying in general, as a person in a personal life, it is really hard on a leadership level to embrace that, because change is scary and it's terrifying. And letting go and stepping into it on purpose, because we're all going to find ourselves in change regardless, but intentionally putting ourselves there can seem like a daunting task. I would think.
Speaker 3:Well, it's counterintuitive, right? We're not just saying tolerate the unfigurable, we're inviting you to embrace it and walk towards it. And that, for leaders, often means walking towards and embracing a painful season of letting go of things, of unlearning things without always knowing what's coming next. One of the images we describe in the book and I've used this often in my own training and development with leaders is the image of the trapeze artist. If you can imagine sitting at the circus and you're looking up and you see there's one trapeze artist up on the stand and the other one starts swinging right and then this one comes out and the goal of the swinging trapeze artist is to grab the hand of the other artist or, in some cases, just the other bar.
Speaker 3:And what we don't see or recognize is that you can't hold on to the first bar and grab the second bar at the same time. You have to let go of the first bar to grab onto the new bar or the hand of your partner. So there's this moment where you're in this suspended space. Fortunately, there's always a net down below right and there's risk there. You could fall, you could fail and you'd have to get up and do it again, and that risk is real and that's the place of learning and growth always. And it's sometimes painful to recognize that what we've always done isn't going to get us where we want to go. And we have to step into that void to say, okay, what's coming? And then patiently wait to see what emerges. Not passively, right, we're in learning and listening mode, but we have to be able to wait and see what comes.
Speaker 2:Learning and listening mode, but we have to be able to wait and see what comes. Yeah, so one, I love the trapeze imagery because it makes it so clear, but I guess my follow-up question would be because you mentioned the risk, obviously, right, you could miss. Yeah, right, and that is scary, but to me it's riskier to not let go. Yeah, but to me it's riskier to not let go, yeah, right, because we're gonna miss out on whatever's next. Yeah, right, we have all sorts of non-profits represented in this audience and I I want to be super open to that.
Speaker 2:There are always going to be non-profits that aren't going to make it right, and that could be because they've solved the problem and they don't need it anymore Great, or just because maybe we didn't take the risk to let go and move past a painful season. You referenced at the top of the show that you came into PLF in kind of a crisis mode, right, we've seen organizations be in that kind of crisis before, and what struck me as you were talking about the trapeze example is like, yes, it's risky, but the risk is that your organization is not going to exist. That's right. Like if we're going to weigh risk versus reward, sometimes it's a bigger risk. To stay, yeah, or to not move would be the way to say that.
Speaker 3:It often can be in the language of life cycle of organization, the minute an organization stops learning, it's solidified its own demise right. When we get attached to and this happens all the time, and in a nonprofit particularly you have different groups of stakeholders. Certainly you have the people that you serve, the people that are the recipients of your mission, whatever that might be. You also have boards, who are there for all kinds of different reasons, and we could do a whole other podcast on nonprofit boards, which we won't take the time to go into today. But nonprofit board members are often very attached to some piece of the mission. They're hard to move right. They're hard to shift and help. It becomes the job of the leader to help them make some moves and let go of some things. That can be one of your biggest obstacles as a nonprofit leader, right? Yes, and in that situation I think the work is and this was part of my own crisis, you know, which was 12 or 13 years ago, when I first became the president of PLF, and one of my board members said to me I tell this story in the book he said we were in a crisis, the board was not fully aligned and there was lots of discussion about what we should do and shouldn't do and all of the things. And one of my board members who is a wonderful guy, still a very good friend said Lisa, you're allowing the system to define you. You have to define yourself to the system, and that began in the leadership work we were already doing. We were helping leaders discover themselves and operating out of the core of who they were. One of my sayings for years, which I adapted from a great nonprofit leader, a woman named Frances Hesselbein, is leadership begins with who you are, not what you do. So you have to answer the question who am I and what am I bringing to this role and to this organization? And it's very tempting in particularly in the nonprofit world where you're on mission to do good, to allow the mission and the organization to define who you are, but you get consumed in that right. And so my work in that season was to step back and say, okay, who am I really? I can't make everybody happy. I have to learn to operate out of who I am. Can't make everybody happy, I have to learn to operate out of who I am.
Speaker 3:We have a chapter in the book called Stay in your Headlights, right. And so what's mine to do and where do I focus my best energy and attention for the good of the organization, the good of the mission, always for the sake of others? Right? We want to do it for our own sense of what I call integration or wholeness.
Speaker 3:For sure, and that's the whole heart of the book is how do we come home to ourselves and understand who we are and operate from that place and not all these roles that people are constantly throwing at us? And you have to be this and you have to be that or that we take on right In this audience. I need to be the great communicator In this audience. I need to be the strategist In this audience, and some of those roles fit and some of them don't. Right, and so the work is to release those that don't and then learn who you have around you so they can bring in their gifts and strengths in a complementary way, and that's what builds a healthy organization. But if the leader is over-functioning and constantly over-extending which happens all the time in, I see it in nonprofit world because the mission's big and oftentimes your resources are not, right.
Speaker 3:And so the hard part is to step back and say, okay, what are the core things we're going to focus on? We can't do everything, and that's a very hard lesson for very mission-minded nonprofit leaders. They see a big mission, they see a big problem they're trying to solve and they're trying to boil the ocean, when what they really need to do is focus and say what's our part in this and how can we do our part? Very well, and that's true for individuals. It's also true for organizations. What's my part and what's mine to do is a question we pose over and over again in the book.
Speaker 2:What's my part, and what's mine to do is a question we pose over and over again in the book. I love that, lisa. This has been awesome. Before we wrap up a little bit, tell us if somebody wants to find the book, how do we do that? And if they wanted to connect with you and learn more about the work that you're doing, how would they find you as well?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the book. We have a landing page for the book. It's in all the usual bookstores. We're fans of supporting independent booksellers. My favorite is Hearts and Minds store. Oh, Byron, yes, yeah, there's a link to Hearts and Minds. The website for the book is lifeinfluxco and that has all the links. It also has ways to find myself and my organization and my co-author, Michaela, and the Dupree Center, where she leads beautifully and offers all kinds of resources to leaders as well. So that's the landing zone lifeinfluxco.
Speaker 2:I love it Awesome. Thank you so much Again. My guest has been Lisa Slayton, co-author of the new book Life in Flux, which is available now, Highly recommend for all leaders, because these are some skills that we all need to develop, especially in today's changing world. So, Lisa, thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, my pleasure, All right. Thank you so much. We will see you next time on the next episode of the Nonprofit Hub podcast.