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Transitions needing years to come full circle

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Transitions needing years to come full circle

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Accepting that transitions don't take weeks, months, or even one year -- it sometimes takes multiple years. How do we dig in and hold each other as leaders but do right by the staff who need to leave and those who are committed to staying and growing alongside us

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The transition gave us a chance to restructure our organization. We are experimenting with a leadership group/circle instead of two or three key leaders. This might create a more robust bench.

Opportunity for us to grow our community's power and have that strengthened and sustained. Deepen community education and organizing. Policies that are being developed and changed. How do we track changes and share with our community members who are activated right now and could be spurred into action.

Inspired by Ember Phoenix - they were looking to break down through theater and art. We are seeing dismantling and institutions broken down. How do we get through it and understand? Out of this, we have a role in our ecosystem that people can connect into as they need. How can temporary time and space with people can cause lasting impact.

We get funding to continue as we are, or maybe expand. We just added five new team members.

My interactions with my family has informed how I organize. It has also influenced my interpersonal relationships. How do we move through conflict could go right. Can I be more embodied and authentic? And then also bring this to movement work.

Can our strengthening within our organization mean leaders are able to authentically to show up in communities and anywhere else they go.

We can create structures for conflict, decision making, and power that helps us go deeper in our relationships with each other.

Be in principled struggle together. And better off for that journey together.

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(Session 3) What does it look like to have a healthy farewell that holds everyone with care?

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(Session 3) What does it look like to have a healthy farewell that holds everyone with care?

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1. Exiting Leader

1. Severance package

2. Messaging the Farewell- Public event- celebrates the leaders and gives the appearance of a healthy transition

2. Board

1. Transfer of information-

2. Keep transition on the agenda for a year before and after

1. Getting people ready for this to be a long process

3. Staff

1. Communication

2. External consultant to help hold the process (1:1 interviews with staff, offer space with non biased person to share

3. Multiple touch points

4. Intentional coaching- matching with the right coach

5. Creating room for people to try and fail

6. Make space for others to offer care e.g. coaching, mediation

7. Space for reflection, retreat, relationship-building

4. Other stakeholders e.g. Philanthropy or coalition partners

1. Communication & reassurance

2. A staff retreat

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(Session 4) How can we bake in support for the messiness? (How do we approach this adaptive challenge?)

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(Session 4) How can we bake in support for the messiness? (How do we approach this adaptive challenge?)

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1. Giving grace and having grace for yourself

2. Commitments from board and staff for onboarding and being in transitions

3. Having a leadership coach, peer support, space for thought partnership

4. Don’t ignore red flags

1. Adopt a learning stance. What is the question we have that is associated with the anxiety (so we don’t have to fall back to assuming the worst)

2. Idea: a conflict coach to navigate conflict.

3. Use issues as an opportunity to build infrastructure

5. Mutuality and reciprocity (Having conversations about power)

6. Time and spaciousness

7. Make space for the full organization to reflect and be engaged

8. Setting clear boundaries and expectations and goals (and not letting them get blurry)

9. 1:1 conversations with board, staff and stakeholders

10. Giving attention to offboarding of exiting leader so it doesn’t impact incoming leader. The incoming leaders should not be held responsible for the outgoing leader’s feelings. E.g. offboarding coaching.

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Guide to preferences, traditions, requirements

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Guide to preferences, traditions, requirements

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“That’s how we’ve always done it!” (A guide to using PTR) - The Management Center

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Learn about PTR, a tool that can help you focus on what really matters so that you can mitigate bias and get to better outcomes.

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Examples of PTR in Action - The Management Center

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Check out some examples of PTR in action, and how to manage towards your requirements with your preferences and traditions in mind.

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DARCI as a decision-making distribution tool

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DARCI as a decision-making distribution tool

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Board Lead - a source of new board members 

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Board Lead - a source of new board members 

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Our BoardLead program and online platform introduces executives and employees from our corporate and strategic partner networks to nonprofits seeking board members.

How It Works

We work at the intersection of nonprofits and corporations to connect diverse and talented professionals with nonprofit board service opportunities that make a difference.

1

Identify Vetted and Value-Aligned Nonprofits

2

Recruit, Train, and Develop a Pool of Talented Candidates

3

Use Our Curated BoardLead Process to Match Candidates with Nonprofits

4

Support Candidates Through Vetting, Nomination, and Election

5

Governance Training for Your Board Candidates and Ongoing Support after Election

6

Measure Your BoardLeaders' Impact After 1 and 2 Years of Service

BoardLead Benefits

It may sound campy, but the BoardLead and Concierge process is a true win, win, win.

Corporations Win

You gain a trusted partner to support your HR-Talent and CSR teams in all things nonprofit board placement, training, and support. Get the support you need to improve employee retention and satisfaction and accomplish your goals.

Professionals Win

Gain leadership experience toward advancing your career goals and connect to new networks while helping advance a cause that's meaningful to you personally.

Nonprofits Win

Expand and diversify your board development network by accessing cause-aligned and talented professionals to meet your governance needs. Do it all while significantly reducing the time it takes to find, vet, and elect impact-ready board members.

The BoardLeader Way

Our mission is clear: to elevate and transform governance in the social good sector through the collective impact of our BoardLeaders.

Every BoardLead candidate is asked to stretch themselves, committing to a high standard of full engagement. By meeting this standard of excellence, BoardLeaders demonstrate that they have the dedication required to rise to board leadership positions and increase their impact.

BoardLeaders commit to:

Engaging robustly in board meetings

Serving on at least one board committee

Maintaining a near perfect meeting attendance record

Contributing a personally meaningful and sacrificial annual gift

Participating actively in all fundraising efforts

Leveraging their skills and network to drive impact

Using their power to advance equity and inclusion

Completing each elected term

We set high expectations for nonprofit partners and board candidates alike.

We ask our nonprofit partners to engage board members in ways that capture the full breadth of what each individual has to offer. We ask our board candidates to commit to "The BoardLeader Way."

BoardLeaders Elected

Since 2015 we've helped nonprofits overcome challenges to finding candidates who are ready to serve and can be effective immediately. Our BoardLead program helps nonprofits develop and grow their board with talent they might not otherwise find. And we're just getting started.

Nonprofits Served

Helping nonprofits succeed is at the heart of our mission. We are honored to work with some of the most effective and dynamic organizations in the social impact space and look forward to connecting with many more.

Investment to Impact Ratio

For every dollar invested in BoardLead by our corporate partners, five dollars is driven back into the nonprofit sector.

Kerri Catalano came in like a spark plug and made other people take notice. She quickly ascended to be Vice-Chair of the board and makes presentations at pretty much every board meeting. She is relentless in pursuing fundraising grants from big institutions and unafraid of cold-calling and asking other people.

Laura Talmus Executive Director at Beyond Differences

We were matched with a fantastic candidate who has a passion for education and a passion for the environment - the perfect combination for our board. She is now a full board member! Fabiana brings great skills in HR and a corporate perspective, as well as the international focus that we needed. The BoardLead team was great, handled our questions with patience, and was very supportive throughout the process!

John Etgen CEO, Project WET: Water Education Today

When you start serving on a board, you become so much more aware and smarter about the possibilities around you and how to seize them... I truly believe the more I lean into this opportunity, the more I can get out of it.

Katarzyna Bednarowicz BoardLeader, PowerPlay

I'm excited to be bringing in someone with incredible skills and enthusiasm who comes from outside our current circle of contacts. She'll bring a much-needed fresh perspective to the board. The communication and information provided [from the BoardLead team] vastly exceeded expectations, and we're thrilled with our match. Thank you for this program!

Taylor Willis Executive Director, The Welman Project

Get Started

Attend an info session for our Spring 2024 round of BoardLead and start your application!

Growing Our Impact

We're growing our reach to help thousands more nonprofits connect with talented professionals who will help them move their mission forward.

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The centerpiece to our personalized board placement services, our proprietary platform connects talented professionals to nonprofit board service opportunities.

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Nourishing the Nervous System by Tayla Shanaye

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Nourishing the Nervous System by Tayla Shanaye

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Written by somatically-oriented therapeutic guide tayla…

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Resources Archive - The Management Center

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We believe that relationship-building is a core competency for effective management (equitable, sustainable, and results-driven). This guide is for managers looking to build (more) supportive and functional relationships with their staff.

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Resources from the Hewlett Foundation Education Cohort on Leadership Transitions  

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Resources from the Hewlett Foundation Education Cohort on Leadership Transitions  

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CEO Succession Plan by Catherine Stihler

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CEO Succession Plan by Catherine Stihler

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Navigating Transitions Love Letter from the Wild Dreams Community

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Navigating Transitions Love Letter from the Wild Dreams Community

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THE ROLE OF AN INTERIM ED WITHIN LEADERSHIP & ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSITION

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THE ROLE OF AN INTERIM ED WITHIN LEADERSHIP & ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSITION

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The Role of an Interim ED within Leadership & Organizational Transition.pdf

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A challenge: figuring out how big my container is, what it can hold, and what I can and should delegate

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Having aftercare

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I've never published a guest essay before, but two of the main core values of this newsletter are amplifying inventive work & ideas and interrogating field-wide narratives. In recent weeks, there's been a glut of crisis reporting on the precarity of the American theatre and I longed for a broader range of perspectives - especially from artists.

Enter Annalisa Dias, one of the most brilliant generative artists and thinkers I know. I'm delighted to partner with her and Regina Victor at Rescripted (an indispensable, artist-led critical platform) to bring you this piece. As Regina wrote in the editor's note: "This brain trust and resource sharing is a natural development as Annalisa dives into the collective wisdom of mycelial networks, and what they can teach us about supporting each other together through this abrupt change."
With thanks to Stephanie Ybarra for always daring me to speak my ideas
Author's Note: One of the biggest obstacles to systemic change is the unwillingness to move beyond the current paradigm we inhabit. We won't be able to identify solutions or viability / scalability of those solutions until we move beyond an economic paradigm driven by scarcity. This essay is for those interested in using the imagination to push past the limitations of our current social and economic containers.
at the time all we knew was the story had run out. all the stories. of staying young to cheat death. of thinking young people wouldn't die. of immortality via "making a difference." of genetic imprint as stability. of stacking money and etching names on buildings. people used to do those things before. not to mention that they would not mention death and would hide the dying away and strive to protect the eyes of the children who already knew everything. at some point. all the dead being here anyway and all of us here being obviously doomed, we let go of that particular game. and started breathing. and saw our hands. i felt like i could fly. Beginning, middle, _______
There are lists going around.
Every day another closing.
Another staff shattered.
People ask "is anyone keeping track of the losses?"
"Who's watching?"
"Do you see the magnitude of the disaster?"
An archival impulse: make a list.
Order the chaos.
Name the emergency.

Do you realize we've become conservation biologists:
Critically Endangered
Endangered
Vulnerable
Near Threatened
Least Concern

Some are reeling in shock.
Some are wringing their hands.
Others have seen it coming for decades.
Their hearts are still breaking...
(Did they truly understand the scale?)
Rooms full of dedicated leaders say over and over
"rock bottom"
While they compare deficit budgets
And whisper incantations
like "implosion" and
"existential threat."
Beginning, middle, _____________
I need a different metaphor than "rock bottom."
I'm exhausted by the stories of scarcity, threats, and imminent collapse.
I'm a playwright and dramaturg so what I know is:
We have a narrative problem.

It's the same narrative problem we have in climate organizing.*
We keep spellcasting about all we're losing
and describing the immensity of the damage,
It becomes too overwhelming to imagine building something different.
It becomes impossible to build the political will to act.

I long for a different dramaturgy.
In Western dramaturgies, endings are final.
In a capitalist narrative of constant growth and perpetual "sustainability,"
endings are tragic.
No wonder people are panicking.
No wonder it hurts so much.
We've been telling ourselves that endings = failures.
Institutional and, worse, personal.

What if instead of dramaturgies of collapse,
we looked to the earth and learned from natural processes of decomposition?

Decomposition is gruesome
Pieces of an organism get pulled apart.
Decomposition is intimate.
Decomposers digest the dead.
Decomposition creates new worlds.
Nutrients recycle and release back into the ecological system.

A dramaturgy of decomposition
Is a tender invitation beyond loss
Toward re-membering our interconnected futures.

Can we be like mycelium? Can we be like soil?
What might we re-compose
with the nutrients being released into the system right now?
What if this moment, painful and raw though it be (and grief has its place),
is not just the ending of a world
but the beginning of something new?
What if instead of at "rock bottom,"
we're at the dawn of an arts ecology that's more healthy?
More loving?
More free?

I long for a theater
that turns its gaze downward to the land,
outward to the water,
and upward to the sky.

I long for a theater
that earnestly listens for the lessons the earth has to teach us.
This is how we'll remember
That like mycelia, like the soil, like interconnected forests and seas
We have always belonged to one another.
This is how we'll find unexpected pathways.
This is how we'll reconstitute the world.

*Let's keep our grief in perspective. We're in the midst of an actual global extinction crisis driven by colonial capitalist enclosure of wealth and an ideological worldview that positions whole peoples and geographies as sacrifice zones. Institutions programming fewer shows or shutting down altogether isn't the root problem.

Beginning, middle, ___________, and then...
In a recent conversation someone told me, "The field is ablaze. It's up to us to put on our vests and be firefighters." Someone else said, "These institutions want to be told what to do. They're looking for someone to save them."

But we don't need saviors. So many leaders of color have been appointed in the last 5-7 years and expected to be singular saviors of institutions that enclosed wealth for decades. So many more are about to be appointed. This again is a narrative problem: we know what happens to saviors. They are designed to be crucified.

No, we don't need saviors. We need world builders.
And thank goddess our field is rife with them!

I see world builders making bold choices to leave behind buildings.
I see world builders mapping and pooling collective resources.
I see world builders (re)investing in local ecologies.
We need mycelial networks and compost and... time.

Where do you see them?
( What you pay attention to grows.)
People keep talking as though there's a single solution to "the business model."
(As though it was ever singular.)
Like whoever can crack the code first will win.
(What game are they playing?)
There won't be a single magic remedy for the whole field.
(Valorizing the monoculture of LORT institutional theaters is what got us here.)
We need to build a solidarity economy of ideas. Not every idea will work for everyone. Not one intervention but many interventions. Not one vision, but many visions.
To change everything, we need everyone.

In the spirit of the interdependence of living systems, I've invited interlocutors to continue worldbuilding alongside me. Their responses will come soon. In the meantime...

Let us revere biodiversity (of form, of aesthetic, of story).
Let us celebrate bioregionalism (think global, act local).
Let us be like nutrient-rich soil (regenerative and moving always toward new life).

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Decomposition Instead of Collapse - Dear Theatre, Be Like Soil

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How do we hold love and compassion as well as the difficulties of individual needs of departing Artistic Directors?

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starting a leadership transition during a time of significant organizational grief/loss/healing

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starting a leadership transition during a time of significant organizational grief/loss/healing

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implementing systems/structures to build cohesion as a team as organizations grow to ensure sustainability

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implementing systems/structures to build cohesion as a team as organizations grow to ensure sustainability

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(re)building of collective leadership with a new team with balance

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(re)building of collective leadership with a new team with balance

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how to disperse the work/responsibilities based on roles

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how to disperse the work/responsibilities based on roles

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How to support and build up youth leadership?

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How to support and build up youth leadership?

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How can the organization actively support its staff in their leadership and professional development plans?

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How can the organization actively support its staff in their leadership and professional development plans?

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What are examples of impactful leadership outside of the traditional hierarchical models?

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What are examples of impactful leadership outside of the traditional hierarchical models?

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What funding support is available to support BIPOC and Queer leaders of color in transitional work and leadership development?

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What funding support is available to support BIPOC and Queer leaders of color in transitional work and leadership development?

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What's the balance of responding to urgent needs vs proactively shaping the future you envision? How do you create space for both?

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What's the balance of responding to urgent needs vs proactively shaping the future you envision? How do you create space for both?

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What do I need to figure out and/or put in place before communicating with others that I’m considering a transition?

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What do I need to figure out and/or put in place before communicating with others that I’m considering a transition?

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How do staff and the organization support the transition of incoming/ outgoing EDs?

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How do staff and the organization support the transition of incoming/ outgoing EDs?

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What does it mean to put caring for myself ahead of caring for the organization?

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What does it mean to put caring for myself ahead of caring for the organization?

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What is a board’s role in leadership transitions?

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What is a board’s role in leadership transitions?

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Why does it matter for myself and the organization’s sustainability that I care for myself, too?

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Why does it matter for myself and the organization’s sustainability that I care for myself, too?

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How do I balance caring for myself with caring for others on the team?

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How do I balance caring for myself with caring for others on the team?