Takes guts, involves risk, can feel like walking through the fire.
Turning away, though, doesn’t mean that the truth you’re ignoring doesn’t exist. It just means that you’re choosing not to see it and stand before it.
Bear witness, find courage, go towards truth.
There is a right time to have that direct, elephant-in-the-room conversation with a respected colleague. The one where you say out loud what both you and she have been thinking.
That time is now. Right now. Today.
Conversations swirl around in every which way, between everyone but the two people who need to sit down and talk. As if that truth is somehow not really out there if we don’t look it in the eye. As if we can get anything – anything – of substance done if we don’t get this out of the way first.
I promise, it will be a huge relief to everyone to talk about this – that thing that matters most, that thing that’s keeping you from getting from here to there.
These conversations need to be rife with respect and dripping with caring. You can’t fake wanting the other person to succeed.
And you can’t wait another day.
I’m constantly amazed, when hearing people formally present their ideas, by the balance of where they spend their time.
It’s immeasurably safer to catalogue your credentials, your track record, and the path that brought us to today. Unfortunately, we can look nearly all of that up that pretty easily nowadays.
What we’re hoping you’ll do is to lay it bare by sharing your thoughts about the road ahead. We don’t expect them to be right, we just expect them to be honest so that we can start a real conversation.
I recently participated in a powerful, surprising, and very positive experience of open communication and feedback. The idea was simple and a bit terrifying: bring a team together and have, one-by-one, an in-person, open 360-degree feedback conversation about each member of the team.
Meaning: sitting in a room with 5 of my colleagues, they went one-by-one describing how we work together, what it’s like to work for me, examples of my strengths and their wishes for how I could grow as a professional. We then went on to the next person.
Going in, it felt scary. Most people are nervous both giving and receiving feedback; doing so publicly feels (at first blush) either like a way to turn the intensity up to a breaking point OR to run the risk of having the whole experience be so watered-down as to not be of much value to anyone.
It had neither of these pitfalls. A little skeptical going in, I found it motivating, supportive, constructive, and reinforcing of the team. As one person in our group said, describing the experience, “We all wear who we are on our foreheads, but we never create a space to really talk about this with each other.” Indeed, in nearly all cases the feedback about each person was honest, clear, and very consistent.
Having done this once, my guess is that this needs to be done in the right way to work. Here are guidelines we used, which I found very effective:
- Context of one’s working relationship with the person
- General assessment of the person’s working style and performance, with at least two positive statements and specific examples.
- At least one piece of developmental advice, phrased as, “My wish for you is….”
With our group of six, it took about a half hour to give feedback to each person, plus time for discussion. So this is definitely a serious time commitment, and we broke it up into three sessions (with the most senior person in the team going first) so we’d have the emotional energy to get through the whole process.
The most surprising thing, to me, was the expression of a shared commitment to each others’ success. Person after person describing your strengths and where you shine is incredibly affirming – and it’s something we do too rarely. The “my wish for you” framing of developmental advice steered everyone clear of comments like “it’s bad when you do this because….” and created a sense of support and collective ownership of the wishes, while at the same time providing clarity about ways each of us could take steps to realize our full potential. I also suspect that going through this process as a group cracked the door open to more open conversations that will happen much more naturally and will flow much more easily now that we’ve gotten this experience under our belts.
This process may not be for everyone and may not work in all groups. You’d need a starting foundation of support and constructive conversation, and you’ll need, I suspect, at least one member of the group who is good at making these sorts of conversations successful and productive and who can model the kind of conversation you’re looking to have.
But if you’re even a little bit curious I’d encourage you to take the leap. As I said, going in I had a lot of doubts and I found the experience to break through a lot of the junk that keeps us from real and open dialogue; and it was about 100 times more real than the much more formal, constrained process I’m used to seeing as part of typical year-end performance reviews.
Give it a go, and let us know how it went.
“Fundraising is all about relationships,” we say.
Sure.
And then we churn through lists and count the level of activity for members of our team (how many calls, how many meetings, etc.), because actually measuring relationships and whether they’re being created is really, really hard.
Of course you must churn through the list. You must reach out more. It’s non-negotiable. You don’t get to hide behind “I’m a relationship-builder so I don’t do proactive outreach” because the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
But you’ll be churning through lists forever, with the same disappointing effort-to-outcome ratio, if you don’t get more of your relationships to cross the emotional chasm.
You know it when it happens – those people with whom you made a genuine connection, those people who touched you as much as you touched them. You know it because you understand these people in a different way – and they understand you in a different way – because you have shared something genuine about who you are, deep down in your soul.
I know. It’s uncomfortable to actually say that kind of thing out loud.
But we’re in this because we actually want to make the world a better place, right? There’s nothing more real, honest and vulnerable than that. That’s why this job is so hard when you’re trying to protect yourself and keep things at arm’s length, and why it becomes natural when you allow real human connection to happen, even if just for an instant.
We have to give ourselves credit – we don’t hide from the hard, scary things in obvious ways. We get creative, and do things that look similar enough to important stuff that we can fool ourselves. For example:
These are just two of many examples. We see this every day – we build our websites before we have any customers and hire staff before we have any clients – not because we don’t know what the real work is but precisely because the real work is so much harder, and being busy with stuff that looks a lot like the real work is a wonderful way to hide.
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Here’s an idea pilfered (with permission) from my friend Jennifer.
It turns out that when people go to museums, they spend up to 10 times as much of their time reading the blurbs next to the artwork as they spend looking at the artwork itself.
Which might be why, when we try to describe what we do, we essentially write blurbs that are good enough (at best) to sit next to the picture…which is a shame since we’re all in the business of creating art. You know: “We aim to revolutionize the customer experience by enabling real-time interaction in a customer-centric fashion using…..” (Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz).
And yes, the nonprofit sector is the worst offender here, because the things we’re doing, the things in the picture frame, are so motivating and so real, and they inspires such a deep human connection that it’s doubly shameful that we use such wilted language to describe what we do.
So, the next time you sit down to write down what you do or to explain it to someone, start by imagining the picture that’s inside the frame, and describe what you see instead.
I promise it will be more real, less polished, and less likely to be interchangeable with the next organization up the block that seems, to all of us, to do the same thing you do. (And I bet you’ll write it in real English too!)
Go ahead, even if it’s not your job to do this stuff, imagine the picture that’s inside the frame for your organization. Describe it 6 words or less. Send your description to the CEO and to the people that really matter.
Have fun.
[NOTE: Just realized that Katya’s (Network for Good COO) blog has some great step-by-step tips about how to do this. Thanks Katya!]
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