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
Cultivating a Growth Mindset in Nonprofit Leadership
What if the key to thriving as a nonprofit leader isn't avoiding failure, but actively seeking it out? That's the counterintuitive wisdom Cathleen Armstead, founder of Sunshine Nonprofit Solutions, shares in this transformative conversation about developing a growth mindset during challenging times.
Whether you're leading a nonprofit through turbulent times or working to influence your organization from within, this episode offers actionable strategies for developing resilience, improving team dynamics, and creating a culture where everyone can thrive through continuous learning. As Kathleen reminds us, "We look at these turbulent times as an opportunity to grow stronger."
Ready to transform how you view challenges and failure? Listen now and discover why your biggest mistakes might become your greatest opportunities for growth.
Get free nonprofit professional development resources, connections to cause work peers, and more at https://nonprofithub.org
Non-profits. Are you ready to spend less time on paperwork and more time making an impact? Save big on Adobe Acrobat Pro, the leading PDF and e-signature tool built for mission-driven work. Apply for your discount now at adobecom. Slash nonprofits, slash acrobat. Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub radio podcast. I'm your host, megan Spear, and joined today by Kathleen Armstead, who's the founder of Sunshine Nonprofit Solutions. We're gonna be digging into a topic that I know every leader is going to want to hear, so I'm really excited for today's words of wisdom from Kathleen. So, kathleen, by way of introduction, tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your work with nonprofits and the type of work you do.
Speaker 2:I'm Kathleen Armstead and I was in the nonprofit Head Start industry for over 25 years and then I left. As in the nonprofit industry, I was giving a lot of advice and consulting as just part of my job, and then I thought I could reach more people if I left my position and founded a consulting company, and that's what I did, and currently I'm writing a book called Leadership During Turbulent Times for Nonprofits, and so I'm really excited to share some of my findings and talk about what works and what I found out doesn't work, and most of those have been my own mistakes.
Speaker 1:Got it. We'll definitely dig into a lot of that, and I think we can all agree that these are rather turbulent times. Leaders are facing all sorts of challenges this year, whether it's cuts to grant funding or reshuffling in organizations and all sorts of pieces that have come about this year that maybe we didn't expect. So definitely a good time for the conversation. Tell me a little bit about what drove you to write the book. What did you see as the biggest issue that the book would address?
Speaker 2:The biggest issue that I see is that nonprofit leaders have to have a number of diverse skills. They have to deal with people, they have to manage budgets, they have to connect with the community and then they have to advocate. And all of those sets of diverse skills. Very few of us are born with them and very few of us are allowed to develop all of them, and that's why I decided to write the book, sort of a compendium of how to get your skills so that they encompass all the things a nonprofit needs. And as part of that, it occurred to me as I was working that advocacy and managing people depend on a growth mindset and that new research has been very, very helpful in my own dealings with nonprofits.
Speaker 1:So explain that a little bit. What does a growth mindset look like? Because I feel like it's one of those words that gets tossed around a lot, Like if you just have a growth mindset but nobody really bothers to define what that is. So let's break it down.
Speaker 2:Okay, let me break it down. Okay, a growth mindset is actually brought about from research with kids with 10 to 12 year olds is where it started. And a growth mindset embraces challenges and likes failure. It's not how to deal with failure, it's actively seeking it out. Because a growth mindset believes that everything you can grow all your talents, all your intelligence, all your sports skills everything can grow. We are not born with talent, we develop it, and so growth mindset began with.
Speaker 2:How do we get children to not have a fixed mindset? A fixed mindset basically means you think that you are who you are. So for girls who are 10 to 12 years old, they tend to say I'm not a math person, versus I have not developed the skills yet. And we as a society tend to reward those children who complete things quickly, those children who complete things accurately and especially accurately and quickly. Accurately and especially accurately and quickly, when what we should be rewarding is those children who struggle with something and then succeed. It's a very different way of looking at challenge and failure. Those people with a fixed mindset, especially kids, if they don't succeed at something easily, they think they're not good at it and they're not smart. So they withdraw from challenges, because challenges will show you up. And in adults I find that it's the imposter syndrome they feel like they're not really good at something, so nobody can find out their mistakes, so they hide it.
Speaker 1:Um, so nobody can find out their mistakes, so they hide it. So my initial visceral reaction was that around the first sentence that you said there, around this idea of like, not avoid, not even just avoiding failure, but actually actively looking for it, everything within me goes oh no, I don, I don't want that. That sounds terrible. Can I please just grow without it? Sounds like a much better plan to me. So how do we? Because I'm going to assume I don't want to paint with a broad brush, but I'm going to assume that most of the people listening would have the same reaction as I did, right? So if that's our reaction, where do we start to change it?
Speaker 2:So most of us want to have a growth mindset.
Speaker 1:Sure, it sounds like a great idea, but I don't want the failure that comes with it. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2:Okay, that was my reaction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't want the critical feedback, Normal human I would think yes it is the very first time you seek out failure is the hardest.
Speaker 2:So you try something that you either have never tried before and have always wanted to try, or you know, perhaps your boss gives you something to try. And what you have to believe in yourself and this takes a lot of reflection, and for me it was a lot of journaling was my talents are not developed yet, and the yet is a perfect word. The other thing is looking at people who have a growth mindset. How would this person describe what I'm feeling? So most of us get that anxious feeling in our stomach and in our brains. Yes, it's like you know, everybody calls it butterflies, but it's more like boulders knocking around in your stomach. The thing is, is to separate yourself from your performance? Is to separate yourself from your performance, okay, and to congratulate yourself and reward yourself for every small step that you take and every time you seek out feedback, because growth mindset is about effort, intentional effort and seeking the feedback. What am I doing wrong In my college students?
Speaker 2:What they'll do when they get a bad grade on a test is they'll try and do the same strategy again. They'll highlight the book. They'll read the book again. That didn't work the first time for them. What they need to do is go back to their professor and say where am I wrong? And that takes a growth mindset and that is developed by telling yourself I have not developed it yet. I'm new to this, I don't expect myself to have developed it yet. And this is an opportunity, not a challenge, but an opportunity.
Speaker 1:That's so good Because you're right. What's the quote? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If I keep doing the same thing, nothing's going to change, right? But again, it's so much easier to just keep doing what I know, right. The challenge is embracing that new. So I guess my two questions and you can decide which way you want to go. First, one would be if someone is finding themselves maybe in a position where they are not the leader, they're in a department, they're working for someone, but they want to embrace this growth mindset to get them to the next level, where do they start, especially if maybe they have a leader that doesn't encourage that? And the second would be on the flip side, as leaders, as heads of organizations, what can we do? Culture wise to model? Model that or make sure that we're building a team and a culture where failure is okay, so people have the freedom to develop that. I'd love to explore both sides.
Speaker 2:Let me start with the leader, because some new research has gone on. This research is actually on the ground observation. So there are three in fact in this research, but I'll only focus on one, and that research is at Xerox, which was a failing company, and it's much easier to see a failing company in the business world. They're not making money, it's very clear, and part of it was they had a leader of a fixed mindset, and a leader with a fixed mindset, especially in the corporate world, tends to surround themselves with people who are loyal, in other words, people who will support what they say.
Speaker 2:What President Lincoln, of all people, did in his cabinet was he invited all his adversaries to be on his cabinet, okay, okay, figuring he would have a better growth mindset though that wasn't called that at the time but he put people around him who were just going to point out his defects in whatever policy. So that's what a leader needs to do is to have people on his or her management team that are predisposed to point out what is not going to work, okay. So this is how a leader starts. At Xerox, they started with that. That was the first step, but the second step was to start valuing people who made mistakes and learned from them. Not who just made mistakes, but those who made mistakes and learned from them. Not who just made mistakes, but those who made mistakes and learned. Okay, so their efforts got better and better. So what we reward, both in the nonprofit and profit world, is employee of the month, somebody who did something very well. Okay, that's not supporting the growth mindset it is a support.
Speaker 2:It's not invaluable, but it's not supporting a growth mindset which will lead to far more growth in your organization. Xerox spent the first year with this kind of diverse people around them and, uh, modeling, rewarding and not punishing mistakes. As long as you learn from them and after the first year, they were in the magazine Time as one of the worst corporations. So it doesn't come about fast. However, within three years, by constantly valuing it, by constantly talking to their employees, what did you learn from that? Whether it was a success or a failure, what did you learn? What are you going to do different? Who have you sought advice for? And they made up their evaluations to mimic those questions. And every meeting started with. You had to start with something you were struggling with and what you plan to do, and then have people give you ideas.
Speaker 2:After four years, they were like phenomenal. They had like tripled their bottom line and they had a retention rate of employees that was far higher than in the industry and people were happy. So there were, you know, a number of great things that went on. So, as a leader, it's first of all recognizing what it is, reflecting on it, spreading that you value it and then constantly questioning what are we learning and where can we go from here? And where can we go from here? It also helps to have somebody come in and train. This is what happens in the brain. You build more connections and we can see it now visually, see it on MRIs and what they call PET scans. What is up in the brain when you make a mistake?
Speaker 1:It's far more active than when you're succeeding. Okay, so I guess let's go back to the flip side, though, because if somebody is on a team and they would love to embrace this mindset, but they might not have a leader or manager who's down with this, go ahead and make mistakes, concepts. What can those folks do to kind of drive that from the bottom up? Or are there ways that they can do it for themselves? What would that look like? What do you think?
Speaker 2:Read about people who have a growth mindset. You know great inventors, explorers, presidents, and seeing how they think about it. There are some books, especially in sports, that show coaches. Many of them have a growth mindset. Okay, john Wooden is a basketball coach at UCLA and he won 10 national championships and coached many of his players to go on to be pros, and the most famous one was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and he wrote a book about John Wooden and explicitly talked about how John Wooden would coach his players.
Speaker 2:Kareem took that information you know digression here. Kareem is my favorite basketball player of all times. He took that information to a team and, of course, he was the star of the team, but he wasn't always and he spread the word about how to embrace mistakes, how to learn from them, how to seek feedback so that you're better, how to practice that feedback and how to keep going back to your most strongest critic and get that information. And by simply modeling it and talking about it explicitly although it wasn't growth mindset at that time, but it was the same concepts talking about it explicitly. It's learning from my mistakes and learning from my successes and doing something different every day. 1% better Okay, it's not if I win or lose, it's if I'm 1% better in that practice in that next day, and that's something that employees can do when they don't have a leader. It is much more difficult to do it bottom up, yeah, but it does work, especially if you model and talk about it a lot.
Speaker 1:If you want to spend less time on paperwork and more time making an impact, we have the solution for you. With Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can streamline reports, speed up contracts with e-signatures and create polished PDFs that inspire donors and engage volunteers. Work smarter with cloud access, top-tier security and powerful editing tools designed for teams on a mission. And with special nonprofit pricing it's efficiency you can afford. Apply for your discount now at adobecom. Slash nonprofits, slash acrobat. I want to go back to something that you had said in the Xerox example, because I think there is, within the nonprofit space, something that we all struggle with is turnover and retention. There can be a lot of reasons for that. Nonprofit burnout is real and there are definite issues that need to be addressed, but I'm curious how creating a culture around this is impacting those two things specifically, because I know that can be. Such a challenge for nonprofit leaders is to retain that talent, keep them engaged and keep them moving forward. So how do those two things correlate?
Speaker 2:So growth mindset in a culture is very conducive to retention. It doesn't really do much for recruitment, okay, but one of the things we do is we hire somebody and then we hire them to see if they're a fit or not. Okay, so growth mindset will hire for a growth mindset, if you want it. In the culture. There was a famous ballerina and she became a master teacher and what she did was when she was trying to select who would be her student it was a very competitive program is she would put them all in a class and that was how she selected. The students were those who asked for criticism, those who were talented and really preened or really congratulated themselves. When she gave them positive feedback, she screened out. She was looking for someone who wanted to always improve, not someone who wanted to demonstrate their success, and that's one of the ways that, if you actually talk about growth mindset in the interview, you can screen for people you can look for, asking what was your biggest mistake? What have you ever done that you really regretted and how did you deal with it?
Speaker 2:Nasa does that, by the way, really, yeah, they will not hire unless somebody has made a big mistake, because they're more concerned about learning from mistakes than actually not ever making them. But in retention, employees, both the nonprofit and profit sector, are saying it's too little pay for too much stress. The growth mindset reduces a lot of the stress. It doesn't do anything for the pay I'll have to be honest for that but it increases the retention rate, to be honest for that. But it increases the retention rate, reduces the fear, reduces the anxiety. Because if you know that you're going to make a mistake and that it's not going to be punished, you're more likely to try something that might work and if it doesn't work, you're more likely to improve on it until it does. And those little improvements make your job easier, make your clients happier and ultimately result in an increased retention rate.
Speaker 1:Now, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I would assume that creating that kind of environment being willing to share when you've made a mistake and what you've done about it, or like the example you gave before of coming to a meeting and saying these are the things that I'm struggling with, who's got some ideas All of those require or at least in my opinion, would require a level of vulnerability that can be really hard in the workplace, because we've been taught to not show that kind of vulnerability. We've been taught to have the happy facade, if you will. Do you have advice for folks who are looking to break down some of those vulnerability walls in their culture?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and it's very, very difficult. I had a client who was new to her program and she was the director. So, of course, being new, there was all this. This is how we've always done it. Sure, well, how they'd always done it had gotten them in trouble and that's why they had a new director, and she shared with them her initial failures as a director at another organization and she said to them I had encouraged her to do this, and she said this is by hiding my mistakes and by pretending it was all working well, I got in more trouble and she was actually let go from that previous organization.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And as she's telling them. She said I was convinced that the way it was being done was the right way and I just needed to work harder. And when she left, she was without a job for three months, which is very, very difficult, and she did a lot of reflecting. And then, when she and I did not know her at that time, but when she came into this new place and she contacted me, we talked about it. I gave her some things to read, just some short articles, some short blogs and she started working on having a growth mindset and that first sharing of vulnerability actually turned her organization around and it happened. She could feel the room, the tension started to lessen as she was talking about her own mistakes and they were pretty bad mistakes and how she learned from them, and people are actually more receptive to that than we think they're going to be.
Speaker 1:I would think so, but for some reason that doesn't feel like it takes away the nervousness of it, because I'm just thinking about myself. If I'm just thinking about myself, if I'm in a situation where someone is sharing a struggle like that with me, I feel deep compassion for them, I can empathize with that and I want to be there and help and support. But yet we just assume that people aren't going to behave like that towards us.
Speaker 2:We do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we do.
Speaker 2:And you know a lot of that is our culture. We're raised in a very competitive culture and you know, in school we all sit in little desks, we don't sit in a big table, so all of that is natural. That first time you have to take a leap of faith and I always recommend to my clients have somebody you trust with you, okay, and who can be visibly actively empathizing with you, okay, have them out in the audience going oh, that's happened to me and just know you have to like, believe it works. After it works, that one time you're convinced and you start seeing the results very, very quickly.
Speaker 2:In school, especially with these 10 to 12-year-olds, they were very afraid of being bullied and being laughed at and being different. You know all those things as a preteen you're afraid of. And it's only the first time that they feel they always feel nervous. That will not go away. But it's only that first time that they feel they always feel nervous that will not go away. But it's only that first time that they're shaking. And again having a friend, having somebody being a cheerleader, you're doing a great job, you're helping them, you're not just helping yourself. Yeah, I also urge my clients when they're going to share their story.
Speaker 1:Practice in front of a mirror Practice.
Speaker 2:Now we can do it with Zoom Just record yourself and you know it's hard, but you have to keep in mind it's worth it.
Speaker 1:I love that. So tell us a little bit more about the book. When is it coming out? When can we look for it?
Speaker 2:I'm anticipating that it'll come out in December. Okay, that's exciting, but it might be January. It's been slowed down because of all the turmoil going on in my world, in your world.
Speaker 1:It will be called leadership during turbulent times and I do anticipate it at the end of the year or the beginning of next year that's awesome, very exciting, and if someone wanted to find out more either about you or your work, or connect with you a little bit more about this, what's the best way to do that?
Speaker 2:The best way is through my email, which is Kathleen C-A-T-H-L-E-E-N at sunshine, nonprofitsolutionscom. And that's all one word.
Speaker 1:All right, perfect. So, as we wrap up today, the question that I've been asking everyone so far this year is if you could give one piece of advice to nonprofit professionals, whether it's maybe an encouragement or a piece of wisdom. What would you say to those folks right now?
Speaker 2:It's kind of a two-part to what I would say. First of all, I would say I know this is going to date me, but I grew up in the 60s and things were worse then and we lived through that. We not only lived through that, we thrived through that. So this is what we're going to do we look at these turbulent times as an opportunity to grow stronger, have a growth mindset. What can we learn from how people are treating us? We will survive.
Speaker 1:We will even thrive okay, and was there a second part to that?
Speaker 2:second part is be sure to develop a growth mindset in your culture. Grab the book mindset and grab anything around that, or Performance Paradox. Those are two great books about growth mindset and that will really help you look at this as an opportunity.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. I love that. I am a giant reader, so I am all for any encouragement that says pick up this particular book. Excellent, awesome, kathleen, thank you so much. I really appreciated the conversation. It's some really good insights for leaders around this culture and especially in today's culture. Those are really helpful pieces. So thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. Again, my guest has been Kathleen Armstead, who is the founder of Sunshine Nonprofit Solutions. We appreciate you listening. We appreciate, kathleen for being here. My name is megan, I am the host of nonprofit hub radio and we'll see you next time.