Nonprofit Lowdown

Any ED will tell you that it feels like stress and pressure are part of the job.  Constant worry and panic got you down?  Join me and my buddy Shalini as we talk about strategies and tactics to make the time for self-care, how to use that four-letter word "H-E-L-P" and being responsible for your own energy.  Shalini is, like me, a recovering Executive Director and coach to leaders.  Make yourself a cup of tea, give yourself a little break and hang with us.  We FEEL YOUR PAIN, y'all! For more about Shalini, check out her website: www.shalinisomayaji.com/

This week, I'm interviewing CEO and Co-founder of New Classrooms Joel Rose.  Joel started his career as a math teacher and created an organization that is re-thinking the classroom experience with technology.  While building New Classrooms, he shares his lessons learned about building an organization, the single most important practice for his team and the importance of being useful over being right.   For more information about Joel and New Classrooms, check it out here: https://www.newclassrooms.org/

Daniel Oscar: educator, nonprofit exec, marathoner.  Listen in to Daniel's gems of wisdom for staying the course in the nonprofit world.  Daniel helped Wendy Kopp build Teach for America and has been in various roles in the nonprofit/education reform sector since then.  He shares his tips on how to run the marathon and not the sprint, how to prioritize self-care and his best advice to young people starting out in nonprofit.  My favorite takeaway: focus on being helpful instead of being right. For more about Daniel and Center for Supportive Schools, check it out here.

Have you ever walked away from a hard conversation feeling like a bomb went off and you didn't take cover?  Join me and my friend and mentor Jen Mayer, Founder of Becoming Better Together to talk about how to have hard conversations with fierceness and kindness, how to learn how to know thyself and how to be in the world even when it's uncomfortable. Jen is the queen of resources and offers this resource as thought-starters and tools for fierce conversations.

Join me for a chat with master coach and my former Board Chair Ted Federici to discuss the common pitfalls of leaders and the mistakes they make.  The job that we have as leaders is daunting and we sometimes do ourselves a disservice by being our own worst enemies.  Learn how to tame the ego, build trust and have the meeting before the meeting.  Bonus: you'll learn some of my favorite "Federicisms" like: "Everyone caters to the craziest person in the room," or "It's just a fart in a windstorm." To learn more about Ted and his work, visit Ted at federicicoaching.com.

Happy Birthday to Nonprofit Lowdown!  Thanks, listeners, for hanging with me for a year.  It's been a blast and a JOURNEY! For today's pod, I'm reviewing three books that have really taken my game to the next level.  There's something for everyone.  For organizational design geeks, there's Brave New Work.  For productivity and people who just need to get to work, there's Free to Focus.  And for managers and leaders who want to give better feedback, there's The Feedback Fallacy: Why Feedback Rarely Does What It's Meant To and the companion book Nine Lies About Work. It's been an honor and pleasure to be in your earbuds this last year.  Let me know if there are topics you'd like for me to review and thank you for listening!

We're back with our resident Technologista Emily Hicks-Rotella!  In today's pod, we talking about our favorite tech tools, tips and books for how to wrangle our to-do lists, get to inbox zero and manage our focus.  Too much to do and not enough time?  Join the club.  This is a must-listen if you're trying to get to work and for tech to work for you, not against you.   Some of our favorite tools: Airtable Assistant.to Sanebox Slack Trello Boomerang Freedom Zapier Streak Notion Tettra Books we love: Getting Things Done (classic!) Free to Focus Atomic Habits

You know how there are people in your life who inspire you to level up your game?  Lisette Nieves is one of these people.  She's an educator, a do-er, a coach and an inspiration.  On today's pod we talk about the challenges of managing a board and staff and how to make people feel USEFUL is more important than making them feel happy.  We discuss the dangers of a bored board, why you need to challenge your assumptions about who you need on your board and the emotional labor of leadership. For more Lisette, check out her website here.

People: your biggest asset and perhaps your biggest pain point.  Join me on today's pod with organizational strategist, human capital and DEI expert Sydney Henriques-Payne to explore some of the obstacles and opportunities with your people.  How do you spark cultural change?  How do you bring on the right level of leader for the maturity of your organization?  How do you put DEI in the center of the work and work with people at different levels of "wokeness"?  Sydney is dropping knowledge bombs like it's her job.   Also, Nine Lies About Work is mentioned on the pod.

Humans.  So complicated, amirite? Today I'm talking with Laura Wolff at Ideas42 about the work they do with nonprofits to boost positive behavioral change.  Learn some quick tips and tricks about lowering friction to desired behaviors and how to make teenagers do things.  We discuss simple changes that make a big impact from increasing enrollment to Gifted and Talented programs to decreasing community college dropout rates. To access FREE workshops @Ideas42, click here. For access to resources we mention on the pod, click here.