 In episode 16 of Mission: Impact, some of the topics that Carol and her guest, Rosalind Spigel discussed include:
Rosalind Spigel believes in the difference nonprofits can make. Her vision is to increase the effectiveness of organizations and coach them – and the people in them – to grow and prosper. In consultation with her clients, Rosalind designs and facilitates strategic planning and implementation, leadership development and coaching, professional development, and capacity building interventions. Links:
Carol: All right. Well welcome Rosalind. It's great to have you on the Mission: Impact podcast. Rosalind: Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Carol: Just to give people some context, I'd like to ask you what drew you into the work that you do? What motivates you, how would you describe your work? Rosalind: Well getting ready for the show today, I thought about my values, right? Because we were going to be talking about values. I want to help give organizations and the people in them a better understanding of where they are and where they're going. Why they're stuck, how they can unstuck themselves. But certainly the bigger - and I'm sure that I've heard your guests say one version or another of this - we want to help make the world a better place. That's the big picture. Then specifically with organizations, just to help them fulfill their missions more effectively, productively and joyfully. Carol: You mentioned that you really use center values when you are doing work with organizations. Why do you think they're so important? What's so important about values and people being clear, not just about their personal values, but then collective values within an organization? Rosalind: For sure. I was listening to some of your other [episodes] - and by the way I really love these conversational interviews that you do. Folks out there, if you haven't heard other episodes, I encourage you to do that. Because, when I listen to other consultants do what they do and [explain] how they do it, it's really helpful to me and anything I can do to bring more value to my clients by listening to shows like yours I think is really good so it felt like values were really a resting place for many of the conversational interviews you've had so far. I really wanted to stir this values conversation up and talk about that more explicitly because it's not just that we work with these non-profits that have terrific missions and visions. It's how an organization goes about fulfilling their mission-vision programs. That is as important as the mission itself. So how an organization treats its people, how an organization treats its clients, its members, its vendors, its board, its funders. It's all that. Everything an organization does should be driven by its values, including what an organization says and no to. We can talk about that a little bit later on, also the values and how that organization defines those values really gives people a sense of, ‘yes, this is an organization I want to be a part of.’ As a consultant, ‘this is an organization I want to consult for with my own values.’ My values include equity, engagement, and capacity building. So if I'm doing some strategic planning work with a client, the process of getting to that strategic plan really includes capacity building, it includes sharing some process. It includes implementation and planning because I want an organization to be able to fulfill its plan. And if an organization expects me to drop a strategic plan on my way out the door, then that's not really a client I'm interested in working with. I just can't stand all the time and effort that goes into a strategic plan and then not have it go anywhere. But engaging levels of the system in the plan itself, I know you and I share a value that people who are impacted by the change should be a part of the change process. That’s just a good idea to help give the strategic plan some legs. So I think that that's part of why I want to talk about values. Carol: Then we can talk about how organizations decide those values. That’s important, I think sometimes people are a little bit leery and maybe even myself, as a consultant about having those group processes around writing a mission statement or a vision statement or value statements and being afraid of it being too abstract. Anything written by a committee, you can just see it in the language, that disjointed stone soup sentences that you end up with everything in the pot. I'm curious about how you approach that so that people really get a chance to dig into what's important to them in terms of their values, without it feeling like it draws momentum out of that planning process. Rosalind: Yes. Well, that's so great, right? Because the way an organization comes up with its values is in and of itself a reflection of its values right? So if you've got three leaders in a room coming up with the organization's values and they say that engagement and collaboration are values, then that's off. That's inauthentic, unless your values are domination and control, then it's okay for three people to dictate what those values are, but probably that's not the case. So how you do bring people in from different levels of the system to come up with the values and, and then that's just the first piece. One of the things I've done while in the before times, but even in these times, when I'm doing a check-in for a values conversation, I'll have a list now. We could write another long story about how we're working online, but I'll have a list of values that I've either inferred from the organization or that may even be listed on their website. If you've worked with a client before and they have agreements that they sort out at the beginning of meetings, you can infer what the values are from those two, but I'll put a list together in such a way that at least a couple of individuals are picking the same word. So in the check-in when people talk about ‘here's the word I picked and why I picked it, why it resonates with me.’ You can already hear that one couple, or three people can pick the same word and it's different. They define it differently. It resonates differently. So it's the same in organizations, right? Let's find out what those words are. We can talk about how to do that in a second, and then how do we as an organization define those words? So one way I've done this is to have people think individually about a big, huge success the organization has had like this big, hairy victory, this great thing that we did, and it ticked all the success boxes and think on that for a minute and then mix people up into small groups. Again, how that's done could be a reflection of the values. Do you mix people up across departments, across functions, just by whoever's sitting next to each other, whatever. Then in those small groups, they think about what was going on that had things be such a success. How are we operating, how are we treating each other? What was happening? Who else did we include? Were there people we included we didn't normally include? Did we show up on time? What was it that happened? So they're having these small conversations and then the report outs when you've gotten the whole group back together, that consultant can begin to list these things. Because often you have to get to values backing into them through behavior, right? So then the consultant can begin to make a list - and I got this from another colleague of mine, Stacy Heath, who said on the West coast, she's like values on one side of the flip chart or Google doc, behaviors on another and really have the client think about what's the behavior and what's the value. How are you defining these things? Because respect could be both for example. So, how were they defining all that stuff? Then you begin to get a sense of what the words are and what the behavioral indicators are. So hopefully at the end of this process you've got, let's say 5 values because I know you've seen this too. You've seen websites that have 14 values and that's meaningless because you just can't keep track of all that. Carol: Can you give people an example of what might be on the value side and what might be on the behavior side? Rosalind: Sure. Like for respect, for, for instance. Everybody wants it and everybody experiences it differently. And that's, oh my God, we're getting, that's a whole other thing about how we bring equity into systems as well, but right. So respect could be showing up to meetings on time. Doing what you say you're going to do, you don't roll your eyes when somebody makes a comment. Those could be behavioral indicators of respect. Really getting specific about what that means and that's definitely part of one of the next steps too. So once we've got the words, how does this organization define those words? Respect could mean something different in a women's organization than it does to an education organization, or a social justice organization, or a homeless organization. So how do we define these words for us? Then what are those behavioral indicators at an individual level, at a group, team, or department level, and at an organization level? You've got all that going on, but wait, there's more! Then how do you begin to operationalize those and what are the mechanisms? What are the practices that we can adopt to make sure that we're adhering to those values, that we're behaving in a way that's consistent with our values? Carol: Can you give me an example of what some of those practices that organizations can start when you've been working with a client, what you've seen through that process? Rosalind: Yeah. There's a great one that I got from Robert Gass who does the art of transformational consulting. He's got a lot of great resources on the website, the social transformation project website this one's called outshine educate. And it's basically a feedback loop. It's basically ‘when you said X, I felt Y because...’ I mentioned equity a little bit earlier, that's a little bit of a soap box of mine, but often nonprofits are white-led, right? They're white-led boards. And they want to have BIPOC folks as part of their leadership, which is great. But the step that they skip is ‘how do we prepare ourselves to welcome others on to our board?’ You don't just start doing equity when you've got a BIPOC person sitting on your board. Then they leave in a year and you wonder why. So educating as a way that organizations and boards serve. Staff can begin to practice what they preach. So let's say you and I are at our board meeting with a bunch of other white people - who are mostly white men - and you say something, and nobody pays much attention to it. Then like three minutes later, Charles says the same thing and people go ‘hmm. That's a good idea.’ I'm sure you've never experienced that. Carol: Right. Never, ever. Right. Never happened. So I might not catch it. Right. I'm just as susceptible to sexism as everybody else. Rosalind: And white women can tend to be a little competitive, so I may or may not even notice it and not know what to say. Right. But if you've got something like a commitment in place for collaboration, engagement, respect, equity, whatever and a mechanism like ‘ouch and educate,’ then you could say ‘Hey, Charles when I said that three minutes ago, nobody really paid any attention to it. And now when you said something, I noticed that people thought it was a great idea. And because of that, I'm feeling invisible’ or ‘that made me feel invisible.’ Or I might have the wherewithal to say, ‘hey, Charles, I noticed Carol said that a few minutes ago, and I'm really glad you amplified it, but I'd kinda like to hear, Carol's original thinking around that,’ The trick here is that, and here's the thing about this ouch and educate process. The trick is for Charles to say ‘oh wow, thanks for pointing that out to me. I'm sorry. I missed that. I know we have a commitment to this and I'm going to try and do better next time.’ That's the right answer. The wrong answer is for Charles to go. ‘No, I didn't mean to, you're misinterpreting me, that wasn't my intention.’ Because that's a showstopper. So if the commitment is to practice these values, then there's also commitment to learning from, ‘I said this thing, thank you for telling me this thing felt off to you and I'm going to try and do better next time, because we're all part of this team and we all want to make sure that whoever's part of the team feels heard.’ Carol: It's so interesting that you describe it as an ‘ouch and educate’ because I'm in a group where - I don't know whether it's organically, or somebody was already aware of this, but we've come to literally say ouch when something like that happens. In a way, it's a gentle way of saying, ‘oh, something just happened.’ before it might've been just feeling tight or something, but just having a very simple thing to say to acknowledge what's just happened can then create the space to be able to say some of the things like you talked about ‘when you said X, I felt this and the meaning I made of it was Y,’ and I wished that you would do Z in the future. Just having that simple thing in the very moment when that happens to you, you just kinda shut down or, you’re flooded with emotion. So you may not have that tool of that lovely little madlib to fill in at your fingertips while you're in the moment. So, having something simple like that gives people a little bit of breathing space to then articulate what they need to say. Rosalind: Yeah. I love that because you could feel it. It's like, ‘Oh, something about that didn't feel right.’ but in that moment you might not be able to really put it together. Just to say that out loud and then give yourself a minute to think about why it was an ouch and yeah. I do love that. That's awesome. Carol: Yeah. And I love what you're talking about in terms of behaviors and practices because it's interesting, when you described that process, I've done a similar process. It was with the intention of coming up with a charter or agreements for a group that's working together and starting again with that good experience of when you've worked either with this team or a different team when you've worked on one that worked really well, and then what made that work well, and what were those elements? When I first did it, I think I stopped at that first level. Then when it was literally the conversation around respect, where we pushed it one more level to the behaviors of how that's demonstrated, how do you experience respect or how does that demonstrate it to you? We have people who talked on the same team completely diametrically opposing answers. One was ‘people don't interrupt me, another person. It was ‘I get into the flow of the conversation and we can interrupt each other and it's great and that's fine.’ So, it was like, ‘okay, well, what do we do with that?’ If we hadn't had that conversation, we would have left in a respect, one person thinking, ‘well, that means no one's ever going to interrupt me.’ And the other person's thinking, ‘wow, that means we can have this “juicy conversation” where it's just flowing and I can interrupt anybody I want.’ Rosalind: Oh yeah that's perfect. Really giving people the freedom to have those conversations, to give people a way to have those conversations. It just reminded me, I worked with these grassroots, social justice organizations, super progressive, really awesome. They had BIPOC and white folks on the board, and at the strategic planning retreat, one of the black board members said ‘I love you guys. I love this organization. I love the mission. I love what we're doing. But there's almost never a board meeting that goes by where I don't experience some microaggression.’ And that was so sad to me. You could just see people groan because they're all about that. They're all about equity and social justice. Carol: Can you define what a microaggression is like? Rosalind: Yes! It's small, so maybe an example would be if we're in a meeting and one of the guys says, ‘hey Carol, can you go get us some coffee?’ It's a behavior and action, a request, a demand, an interaction in which one person feels like they're being subordinated in some way. Carol: Absolutely. I just want to make sure that terms get defined so thank you. Rosalind: Yeah. Or, ‘why don't you take the minutes,’ right? Not that I’m speaking from experience on that either. Carol: Wait a minute! I think we're rattling off all the common ones for women. Rosalind: Yeah. Especially me since I'm of a certain age, I definitely experienced that. It's interesting. So there's another thing that I was thinking of too, when we're doing values work because we do process consultation. So we go into organizations with some great process, some great question because we believe that the client can come up with its own answers and solutions. Maybe a whole other conversation, about to what degree clients to consultants come in with recommendations, with the guidance, with whatever. So I actually do come into these values conversations with a list of values. I know organizations can come up with them or people can come up with them too, but it just seems to be very helpful for folks to have a page or a friend of mine put together like 500 values cards. That's maybe a bit much but a page where people can go, ‘oh yeah, patience or generosity or empathy or courage’ so that they have those words and I think it makes it easier for them. I don't know if you’ve found that as well. Carol: When you're saying that you're looking at and, and what's so interesting for me about this conversation, as I think about the things that I've experienced in the nonprofit sector over the years is that disconnect between a mission with good work out in the world, and then how people are treated inside the organization. I think part of that is that you're able to look at the statements that the organization is making, the conversations that you've had with folks already. So you already have a sense of taking all of that implied information and then making it explicit and putting it down on a piece of paper and saying, ‘okay, these are the 5, 6, 7 values that I'm seeing.’ So what it sounds to me like is that you're tailoring it to the organization based on what your experience of them is versus a generic sheet of ‘here's 50 values, pick three of the most important ones for you.’ So I think that it often does help to not start with that blank slate but give something to people to react to. Rosalind: Yeah. I want to pick up on something else you just said too, because once you've clarified the values; defined them, indicators, mechanisms, all that. Then it really is — I think Tip talked about this too, Tip Fallon, one of your other guests — how does this look into how, how our values are embedded in our processes and practices? How do we treat each other, who gets promoted and why. What kind, or do we even subsidize professional development and what professional development, and where do we put out our job postings? Do we make sure that the language isn’t excluding any particular identities? So there are all the ways in which this can really get embedded in processes as well as organizational processes. So when you look at how you embed these things at all levels of the system, you just reminded me about that too. Carol: Then the example that you were starting to talk about in terms of the social justice organization that you mentioned, and the black board member saying, ‘yeah, we have all these values. We have this mission, we do this work and I'm still experiencing this.’ So I'm curious then what came out of that conversation? I don't want to suppose what might've happened. How did that become an educational moment? I'm sure people just work, but I can imagine how much chagrin they felt of ‘Wow, we really think we're doing the good thing and we're still susceptible to these.’ Rosalind: Yeah. And they are, of course, right. That board member didn't assume any bad intention. I mean, he felt that he was welcomed in many ways. It had been part of it for a long time, but it did highlight ‘okay, well then. if these are your values and this tension, then what are you going to make a part of your strategic plan going forward?’ What board development, what board training, what are the actions you need to take that are going to ensure that you stop doing that and start doing something else that welcomes people in so that they don't experience that. It was a real gift. That's the thing, if someone says, ‘hey, when you said X, I felt Y.’ It is such a gift that that person has given you. How else are we going to learn? Right. I mean, we've all got our work to do. We're not going to be able to get any better unless someone is generous enough to point out where we are sticking our foot in it. Carol: Yeah. And even if the reaction in that moment isn't the perfect one — I certainly can think of many times I've been given feedback and my immediate reaction is to get all defensive and come up with 6,000 reasons why that was fine and I should have done it and all that. Then later, I calm down and sit with it, think about it, and come back to the person with something a little more rational, a little more reasonable and absorbing it and being able to learn from it. We're human and it's not always in the moment, but the closer it can be, I think that's what I'm striving to do is have it in the past, I think probably between the moment, if it happened to me. And then when I talked to the person, it might be very far apart. So just trying to get that closer and closer together. Rosalind: I have spent years and years cultivating my ability to get feedback almost into a superpower because I'm right there with you. I can feel it in my body, I can feel that panic tension, whatever it's like, ‘oh god’ and part of that is how much of that is white perfectionism and all the rest of it. It's, ‘oh man’ So we were just grappling with all kinds of stuff, but being able to calmly hear the feedback and just be grateful for it. Carol: I don't know if it's generational, but I certainly didn't grow up learning or having that model for me. It was all about the debate and proving that you're right. It's unlearning all of those very well-honed ways of thinking, ways of being, it's unpacking that and relearning it, unlearning it as an adult just takes even longer. Rosalind: Yeah. And that's where some coaching can come in. So let's say you're going back to your system now. You've got all these great values in place and you've got somebody in the development department who is really raking it in. They're doing great, they're raising all this money. It's really awesome. But they're stepping on people along the way. They're really not being collaborative or respectful or whatever. Their actions are very inconsistent with those values. So the options are: you coach that person into changing their behaviors and you go through this delicate process of getting the feedback and integrating the feedback. But if that person doesn't change their behaviors, then you've got to let them go. You can't have somebody in the system who is flagrantly stepping all over people and disrespecting them and not acting in a way that's consistent with the values and get away with it. It's horrible for morale. We'd talk about values and what that represents. That's part of an organization's reputation, right? So word gets out and this person's getting away with all this stuff and morale is really bad and you're about to mutiny. Now there may be a hit in the short term if that person needs to go, but in the long term, you've really made the right decision because you can't have somebody acting out and then expect other people to behave consistently with the values either. So that's really hard, but that is also part of how you promote people, how you reward people. It all has to be consistent with the values Carol: If you've actually had that conversation and you've defined what the values are and how those show up, how you’re going to demonstrate those. Then everyone's come to an agreement when that person then acts that way. you have so much more of a platform to work from because you've had an explicit conversation about what behaviors are acceptable and which aren’t. It's just so much easier to start from there then to have started from no conversation at all. Where you infer something, or it doesn't feel right, or it seems out of alignment. But then the person might be able to argue, in some way that it is right from their point of view. Rosalind: Or they just may not see it. Maybe nobody's ever called them out on it before. There could be some level of obliviousness. I mean, they think they're doing great because they're looking at the numbers. Right. Carol: And may have believed that that value of bringing in the money is the most important, whatever the means. Rosalind: Right, yeah. Well, we're starting a new year so it's a good time - I mean, it's always a good time to assess - but generally the values get revisited when you're doing strategic planning. I mean, a lot has happened in the past year. So what I do sometimes with clients, and when you're doing strategic plans, obviously there should be something in place where there's regular checks on progress to the plan. If an organization is about ½ to ⅔ of the way through their strategic plan, then it's a good time to maybe take a moment to really think about how you're doing. How are you doing with the mission, vision, and values? I got this actually from Scott Blanchard, who - and I've done this too with strategic planning - basically there are four questions. If you're looking at this, it can all be framed through the values. So you're taking a breather and you're reflecting on the plan and how you're going through with the plan. So one question is, of course: what have we done that we meant to do? What were those things that we planned to do? We did them, we can check them off the list and claim some victory and go forward. Then, especially given this past year, what were the things that we did that we didn't set out to do, that we didn't plan to do, but it's really, really great. We did that, right? Like we learned about online virtual collaborative learning and we revamped our communication strategy or whatever it is. It's really great. We did that, given the events over the past year, and then you can claim those as accomplishments and celebrate those as well. Then, what is it that we plan to do? Is there anything that we don’t need to do anymore for whatever reason? Like those things that we thought that the moment has passed. We thought we needed to do them, but we don't need to do that anymore. You could just cross that off. Then of course there are the things that we plan to do that we still need to do. Do we need to adjust those things or do we need to adjust how we're doing those things? So that's where the values conversation can come in as well. So I think that that's another way to begin to bring values into the conversation and also check to see where the organization is because, you know, mission impact and martyrdom and all that. There's so much that nonprofit staff does, they're so overwhelmed all the time. Giving the organization a break to reflect on this stuff and think about how they're doing, and what they do as well as why they do what they do. I think it’s a great break. Carol: I've experienced working with clients sometimes, there seems to be a fear with strategic planning that it might just pin you down or that you have to get everything in there to make sure all the bases are covered, but I tell clients to not only finalize the plan, but finalize the process that you're going to do exactly what you're talking about in terms of those regular check-ins. It doesn't have to be all the time, but at some point, some set period, whether it's a year, halfway through, to check in, ‘where are we?’ Ask those questions that you're asking, ‘what what do we need to continue doing? What've we done? What do we need to stop doing?’ And then, what did we do that we didn't expect is really, really useful. You talked about the implementation planning, I think mapping out how you get started, but not trying to map out every detail all the way through does anything because you end up with this binder that goes on a shelf or holds up computer monitors and doesn't get much use otherwise. Rosalind: Right. You're reminding me of a client I had. I love this client. One of their values was to be a learning organization. And one of the ways that they put that into practice was the. The strategic plan itself was an opportunity for staff to do that. So the ads themselves came up with their own mini strategic plans that were all aligned with the larger mission, values, objectives, and they came up with their own implementation plans as well. So here's the goals, here's the strategies. Here's the tactics, here's the timeframe notes about when we need to do this and who's going to be responsible accountable with the measures of success are what the budget impact is, you know? So that was really interesting that was part of a way in which they really brought that learning organization to life. They're doing their own research. They decided to take the organization in a particular direction and have become wildly successful, really a mature organization doing some groundbreaking work and in creating all these feedback loops between the client and researchers and staff. And it's just amazing. They're doing great work, but they're really putting their money where their mouth is. It's really paying off in every way. Carol: That's awesome. Well, at the end of every episode, I play a little game and ask people an icebreaker question. So I'm curious, what was your first job? Rosalind: This is a good one. I want to know what your first job is too. So, I grew up in a little bitty town in Canada called Niagara on the Lake. There's a little ADPD town and it had a theater called the Shaw festival theater. In between the matinee and evening performances on a couple of days a week, can't remember what they were now, the cast and crew didn't have time to go out and get their own dinners so they needed to get fed. That was my first job. My name is Rosalind and I found a friend of mine named Celia and Rosalind and Celia are characters in a Shakespeare play by the way. So the actors always got a kick out of that, but we had our budget and we would do the shopping and we did the cooking and the serving. We did that twice a week. I think we might've done it for at least a couple of summers, and that was a really fun first job. Carol: That's awesome. Mine was a little more boring. Being a babysitter was my first. Rosalind: I was a terrible babysitter. Carol: I didn't claim that I was a good babysitter. I just said I was a babysitter. Rosalind: I can't remember. It was certainly pre-driving, so I must've been like 12, 13, 14, somewhere in there. Well, that's very entrepreneurial of you. Carol: I guess I did my Babysitting gig because I specialized in - I have a brother with special needs - I babysat for families who had kids with special needs because they often couldn't find a babysitter. I got double the rate of like, instead of just $1 an hour, I got $2 an hour. I actually found most of the time that those kids were easier to take care of then typically developmental kids because they saw me as an authority figure, so they would listen. I felt like I was doing one over on the parents cause I got paid more to take care of kids who actually listened. So, what are you excited about? What's coming up for you and what's emerging in your work this year? Rosalind: Well, I'm actually moving.I love doing the strategic planning work, and making sure that there's some implementation piece and check-ins for the organization as they go. I’m also moving into a little bit more professional development work. I've been working with a colleague of mine. This year we've begun open forums on race. So we're having these open conversations every couple of weeks, and we'll continue to do that this year which I'm loving. So I’m deepening, my own work around race and privilege and my professional work on equity. I think those are the things I'm excited about. How about you? What are you excited about? Carol: I'm working with a number of clients on strategic planning and really enjoying that because I think as you said, it provides that time to just step away and look at the bigger picture as you described the overwhelm of non-profit work it's hard to have that space and time to step back and think differently or think critically about the work that you're doing. My hope is really to help organizations turn down the noise and turn up the signal, like focusing a lens that, and, and it just gives people a chance to have those conversations so that they're not all working from different assumptions. Rosalind: Thinking about one of your other guests, Nyako, who talked about mindfulness, and each of us individually really have to take a little bit of time for our own clarity. I'm thinking, in terms of how an organization engages in mindfulness, just by stepping back and getting that clarity as an organization, I love that. Your clients are lucky to have you. Carol: Thank you. So how can people find out more about you and then get in touch? We'll put the links in the show notes. Rosalind: Oh, sure. Well I am on Twitter @SpiegelConsultin without the G. Twitter didn't let me put the G in I dunno. So a little bit on Twitter, I'm on LinkedIn, I have my own website Spiegel Consulting. I think those are the big three for now, then of course, my email Rosalind Spiegel Consulting. Carol: All right. Well, thank you so much. It's been a great conversation. Thank you so much. Rosalind: Thank you.  In episode 13 of Mission Impact, some of the topics that Carol and her guest, Peter Lane, discussed include:
- How to bring health and wellness training to organizational consulting - Why you should hire a health and wellness coach - Understanding how others feelings impact your own and vice versa - How organizations can utilize their resources to better care for their employees - How organizational culture impacts employees’ ability to take advantage of those resources - How leaders set the tone for an organization’s culture - Adapting wellness policies for the COVID-19 Pandemic Guest Information: Peter Lane is an organizational consultant with more than 20 years of experience. He is also a National Board-Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC) trained at the Mayo Clinic. Peter works with individuals and teams that are committed to ongoing learning, reflection, and making positive change for themselves and their organizations. Before becoming a wellness coach and consultant, Peter worked for 18 years as director of programs at the Institute for Conservation Leadership After working with many nonprofit leaders over the years who were experiencing the negative physical and emotional effects of burnout, he decided that focusing on wellness in the workplace is an important strategy for how he can contribute to the success of nonprofit organizations. Peter serves on the board of directors of the Reve Kandale Foundation. He received a Bachelor’s degree from Clark University and a Master’s degree in Education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Links: https://www.peterlanecoaching.com/ peter.lane100@gmail.com Interview Transcript: Carol Hamilton: Welcome Peter. Thanks for coming on Mission: Impact! Great to have you on. Peter Lane: Thanks for having me! Carol: So I just want to start out by asking you what drew you to the work that you do? What really motivates you and what would you describe as your ‘why’? Peter: Oh, such a great question. It's something that many of us ask ourselves as there are shifts at different times in our lives, but for me I would say that I've always worked in the non-profit field, so that's really anchored me in community-based organizations and people coming together to solve problems in their community. And more recently, I became certified as a health and wellness coach, partly from my experience working with nonprofit leaders and partly my own interest. So for me that's been really exciting and part of my ‘why’ is how I can bring my health and wellness background to non-profit organizations and leaders. That's something I'm still working on and figuring out how to do and how to incorporate it into the consulting and coaching work that I do. Health and wellness coaching is a new field in and of itself, so it's an exciting time to be working in both spaces. Carol: Yeah, and it's certainly something that's so needed in the field. I've had a couple of different people on and we've talked about the whole problem of burnout with nonprofit leaders and how hard it is to do things around self care, and maintaining those boundaries. But I'm curious, when this episode is going to be released, it'll be just about the time of year when lots of people are thinking about the end of the year, making resolutions for changes, I'm starting at the individual level level. What are some things that really help individuals start to shift their behavior towards wellness? Peter: Well, in some ways, when working with the organizations, we try to help them create a shared vision organizationally about where they want to go. And in many ways it's the same for individuals. People do look for a health and wellness coach for a variety of reasons, and often it's something like, ‘oh, my doctor told me I needed to lose weight.’ So that's the presenting issue, but the challenge is to work with those individuals to get a sense of how their life will be different? How do they want life to be? Really helping them think about and craft a vision statement for their own wellness. That's really the starting point along with helping them do a little self-examination around their values. What's important to them, their strengths, what are the capacities there that are going to help them make a behavior change? Also thinking about when they have faced similar situations, and what helped them accomplish their goals around that. There's that sort of self-learning along the way, and that's where we usually start: helping people get grounded in who they are and where they want to go. Carol: It makes a lot of sense. Stepping back and starting with that vision, which people often want to do, but without some structure or process to walk them through it, it's a thing that you might get around to doing, maybe sometime next week. And committing to a coach, you're then helping them take those steps that started helping them. It might've already been there, it's probably been there, but not necessarily clear about what that vision is. I'm guessing that it's more around all the things that you don't want. Peter: Yeah, for some people, it really is a challenge to dig deep, to think about what they want their health and wellness to be different beyond wanting to exercise more or wanting to lose weight, or wanting to have a more balanced life, or whatever it is. That's buried deep. And helping people bring that out often relates to things around their family, or how they want to age, or sort of different things that they might be able to do in their life. And that can be a very regulatory process that really connects them to the work ahead, making the behavior changes. Carol: You talk about those behavior changes, because I feel like we've read a million magazine articles about 10 steps to exercising more regularly or whatnot, but what does the evidence show in terms of what really helps people take positive action in terms of making those behavior changes that they want? Peter Lane: Well, one that we've just been talking about is connecting to that deeper purpose and vision. You and I think about the same way with organizations: what are the smaller steps that they can take to get there and to build confidence around those steps? So when I work with somebody in health and wellness coaching, I always say that there's gotta be setbacks. That's actually part of the process, and actually, setbacks are good because you can learn from them and that will help you as you continue setting realistic goals and helping people think about what in their environment will support them and making those behavior changes. Those are the kinds of things that are gonna support people as they go along their journey. Carol: I think setbacks are inevitable in a process like that. So what are some things that you've seen people learn from those setbacks? Peter Lane: I think the biggest one is — I guess it's self-love, being kind to oneself. People beat themselves up. We’re our own harshest critics, and so one of the biggest lessons is: it's okay. Don’t go down the guilt path or the beat yourself up path. I see that as the big lesson. People begin to understand how the people around them — most often a partner or spouse — how their interactions and their behavior together impacts their ability to make those behavior changes. So it's occurred to me — and I haven't done this yet — but I've thought about doing couples’ health and wellness coaching, because it really is a family system. It really does have an impact on what your relationship is with the others around you. Carol: That's so key because I think that too often in our culture, we think about the individual and we don't think about the whole context that the individuals are living in. Just that first round of who's in their immediate family, who they’re living with, how is that going to impact what they're going to be able to do? Even as we're coming into winter, my husband’s gotten into biking regularly and that’s the thing that he's been able to do most consistently in terms of exercise. I'm not going to be inviting anyone from Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner so we decided — or I suggested — that we should just make the table small. We'll get rid of the extra leaves that are in the table and take half the dining room and set up your bike with a trainer that enables you to do it inside, just knowing that he had suggested that he’d do it in the basement. I knew he would never go into a dreary basement in the morning when it's cold, it's gotta be somewhere inviting. There has to be that context around it to make it possible to want to get up. Peter Lane: Yeah, that's a great example. You start thinking about how you can make changes or shift things in my environment that will actually help me make those behavior changes. Carol: Yeah, because the last thing you want to do is buy yet another piece of equipment that becomes a very expensive clothing drying rack. Peter Lane: Absolutely, yes. Carol: So it's easy for people to see how health and wellness impacts, or relates to the individual. You say you talked about it in connection with organizations and with nonprofits. Why would you say that wellness is really important for organizations to think about as well? Peter Lane: For a while, I was involved in co-leading a leadership development program that involved coaching for the participants. So over the years, I was talking to a lot of people and I would say — it's sort of anecdotal — but often the coaching got around to things like really wanting to spend more time with my family or my kids. I don't have enough time to exercise, that’s why I'm so stressed out. So it was all of these issues that were not related to managing staff or leading staff or boards or fundraising or all of those other issues. It was their personal wellbeing and, at the time, I didn't realize there was such a thing as health and wellness coaching, but what people talked about were things that interested me and I could see how their personal wellbeing was impacting their leadership and their ability to do their job. That really stuck with me. And when I struck out on my own as a consultant, before I hung out the shingle, I did a lot of thinking about what I wanted to do. What were things that interested me, what were parts of my work previously that I really enjoyed and gave me satisfaction, and worked with a coach. So I really, I really saw this connection between work and personal life, and taking care of yourself, and how, if you take care of yourself, that gets embedded in the organization. And in my mind, anyway, if we have healthy individuals taking care of themselves, our organizations will be healthier as well. So that led me to the field of health and wellness coaching, and that's my interest. Carol: My tagline for this podcast is, “how to be a nonprofit leader without being a martyr to the cause.” And I think what you're talking about is all of that, because it's so easy. In the western world, in the United States particularly, the glorification of overwork is so much there. And then when you add in a cause that you really believe in oftentimes there's always more work than there's capacity to deal with it. It's very easy to get pulled in and not set those boundaries. Not be able to really. And then what you talked about is how that shows up and in terms of that impact, on the individual leader and then how that ripples out through the organization. So when you were coaching those folks, it was around their leadership, and yet it was these ‘personal’ issues that were coming up. How did you see that impacting how they were showing up at work? Peter Lane: It was in a variety of ways. For example, in leadership there's such a great degree of how you manage yourself and how you use yourself in different situations and the extent to which a leader can be intentional about how they're acting. They can access more information, more of their own personal resources, and act in a more strategic and intentional way. When people are stressed, their ability to do that decreases. So there's that part of it, how they're interacting with others. And I also think — Carol probably in your work too — you see individual leaders and organizations, they really set the tone. Regardless of who's there, they really do set the tone. So leaders who are modeling healthy behaviors that promote wellness for him or herself, that’s also gonna shift the organization. I think we've probably all seen leaders who are running a hundred miles a minute, or over-scheduled and that just creates tension around for others who feel like they have to be running at the same pace because so-and-so is. Those kinds of unhealthy behaviors for individuals can really seep into the organization. Carol: Have you experienced that at all in your, in your work? All the negative consequences? Peter: Yes. Which is fine. I mean too often, but I think most of the time it's very well intentioned. Like the person is really dedicated to the cause and they want to see that work done and there's just, there's always more work than could possibly be done. So, in their role as an executive director or someone higher up in the organization, there's a tendency to take on responsibility as well and get isolated from the rest of the organization. For a little bit, I worked at an organization where they still operated under the myth that summers were quiet. Well, we did like half of our leadership programs during the summer. So there was never a break. We went from getting to the annual conference and then it'll be quiet, and we'll get past this thing, and then it'll be good. And it just never stops. Carol: There's always the next thing. So yeah, I’m wondering if, with organizations that are like, “okay, we're tired of this, we know we're burning people out, we know that we're losing people because of it.” What are some things that an organization can start to do to incorporate more of a wellness perspective into their work? Peter: Yeah. I mean, I choose strategies based on how they can incorporate health and wellness into their organization. One is just around policies and procedures, the nuts and bolts of what they offer employees. A lot of organizations, to some extent, do that. And it might look different for different organizations. [It might be] flexibility around work schedules, or providing a meditation room, or setting aside time during the week when staff have, almost professional development, set aside time for an hour to read a book that you wouldn't normally have a chance to read, purchasing healthy snacks and water. Those kinds of things. I've been talking with other coaches and organizations — and this tends to be larger for-profit organizations where employee assistant programs, a health and wellness coach is available to the organization. You don't see that in the nonprofit world, but that's one thing that I would love to see: making that available to more non-profit organizations. Then the other area that I think about is organizational culture. The policies, procedures, the nuts and bolts of things are a little easier to implement where organizational culture and shifting that is probably more long-term. It takes a different intention. As part of that, I think about organizations that somehow build that into their strategic plan or their vision of how they are as an organization. Then once you do that, I think you can begin to think about the practices that are going to support wellness in the workplace and help you move along that path to create an organization that's going to sustain individuals in a healthy way. Carol: Yeah, it's interesting. When you talk in terms of steps that an organization can take, there are those more nuts and bolts-y things, but even when they do that, I worked in a larger organization that had some resources and they ended up setting aside one room, what had been a small conference room, and made it a napping room, but the culture did not support anyone taking a nap during work. Peter: Yeah. Carol: I have to admit that I would sneak down, look around and try to make sure that no one would see me. Like I hadn't slept the night before, so I really was falling asleep at my desk. It wasn't like I was getting anything done or being productive anyway, but I remember just feeling like I had to make sure that no one saw me as I snuck in. Peter: That's a question of culture, right? People don't feel comfortable doing that. Carol: I think that the more successful thing that they did — and it was interesting because it went beyond just that one organization, there were a number of different nonprofits in the same building. Obviously that was when we were all not working from home, but all the different organizations hired a yoga teacher to come and offer a class once a week. And it had a great response, and it was great because we actually met people from other organizations, and there were probably some other ripples of meeting these other people who were in the building, who did similar work that you might not have met otherwise through the yoga class. So that went a lot better than the nap room. Peter: Yeah, it's interesting. At the beginning of the pandemic I had requests to do what essentially were 30 minute, virtual self-care sessions which were a great way to bring people together, and for staff of one organization, it was an opportunity to come together in a way that wasn't trying to figure things out or working with all of that craziness going on. But interestingly enough, now that we're seven, eight, nine months later, people aren't doing that as much. It's like we've moved past the self care stage. Carol: Yeah. Out of the crisis where we felt like we really needed to pay attention, but what are some other things that you're seeing organizations do, with so many people working remotely or working from home in terms of supporting employee wellness? Peter: I think people are still trying to figure that out. What I've been hearing lately is the tiredness of being on Zoom or being in virtual meetings and people trying to figure out how to minimize these or work in some other way. That's a big one, and then [working] around people's schedules, they've got PR for many of the people that have kids at home. They're working, but they're also being parents and teachers. So organizations and individuals are trying to figure out how to create the right flexibility and support for individuals that are in these different kinds of situations. Carol: Even thinking about when you really need a video meeting where people need to be on the computer and when you don’t. [For me,] when I'm just talking one-on-one with someone, I'm mostly making phone calls to just not have extra screen time, and then you could — depending on the situation — take that call as a walking meeting. So that's one simple way that I try to incorporate that during the day. Peter Lane: I also like thinking about how long meetings actually have to be. If you schedule it for 30 minutes, or an hour — even if it's the same topic — if you scheduled it for 30 minutes, it will probably go for 30 minutes. If you schedule it for an hour, it'll go for an hour, most likely. Just being really conscious of why you're meeting and how much time is actually needed for that. I also love the idea of the walking meeting. I know that's not for everybody, I find it a little bit of a challenge, but I've been in meetings and talking to people that do that. And I think a great way to break up the day. Carol: Yeah. So one thing that I always do at the end of each episode is play a little game where I ask you a random icebreaker question that comes out of my hand and a little box of icebreakers, so the question for you is: if you could go back in time, what's one thing that you would tell your teenage self? Peter Lane: I would tell my teenage self that everything will be okay. Carol: I think that's good advice for all of us right now. Peter Lane: You will be okay. Carol: Yeah. So what are you excited about? What's coming up next for you, what's emerging in your work? Peter Lane: Well personally — and I didn't mention this — I'm getting married in a couple of weeks, so I'm looking forward to that. But that's obviously on the personal side, professionally next year, generally I'm just really interested to see how things progress in terms of the pandemic and what impact it's going to have on organizations. Obviously everything hasn't played out yet in terms of [whether] we go back to normal, or if there is some new normal, and how that is going to impact organizations and the work they do. So I'm interested in that. And then I've been talking with a colleague about putting together a leadership support/coaching series, a cohort that we would offer together and be able to incorporate health and wellness coaching into that. So we'll see. Carol: That sounds awesome. How can people find out more about you and get in touch? Peter Lane: You can check out my website, peterlanecoaching.com, and my email is peter.lane100@gmail.com. Carol: Well thank you so much. Well put those links into the show notes so folks will be able to get access to them. Peter Lane: Great. Well, thank you, Carol. This has been a lot of fun and a great opportunity to talk about the work that I love. So thank you. Carol: All right. Thank you. |
HostI am Carol Hamilton, nonprofit consultant and podcast host. My passion is helping organizations cultivate healthy, inclusive cultures that live their values, fostering learning, creativity and results. Find me at Grace Social Sector Consulting and download free resources. Archives
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