Permission Slips Every Nonprofit Leader Needs Right Now

Learning about yourself is foundational to all leadership development programs and coaching.

Oftentimes, this comes in the forms of various style assessments, whether it's the Myers-Briggs, the StrengthsFinder, 360 evaluations.

It also comes in observing yourself in your day-to-day interactions and reflecting on that, observing and tracking what your triggers are, and learning how to manage them.

As Michael Randall points out, while people often get promoted for proficiency in their technical skills, it is self-awareness and people skills that really matter as you move into leadership.

Many of the leaders I work with have risen into leadership roles because they are, I'm gonna use the word technically proficient.

They know the sector, and so they've risen up in the organization with increasing responsibility.

But as you get higher up, what makes more of a difference in what, in how you do things is not your technical smarts, but your people smarts.

So what I would be encouraging leaders to do, and, and I do this in the work with them, is really to understand yourself as a leader, have self-awareness about your leadership style and your preferences, but also pay attention and learn about how to work effectively with and through other people, one-on-one, through teams, because that's really how you can expand your reach and your influence.

You can't do it all yourself, and so you're really wanting to develop and let loose the people around you, and so you need to know how to do that as well as you know about the technical material of your organization's work.

As part of this work of building self-awareness and admitting that you do not know and having the humility to learn will serve you well, as Stephen Graves points out.

People who have attended learning skill-building sessions with me, again, I'm gonna use another hip hop reference here, paraphrase a lyric, but from Common, out of Chicago, once said, "You should have the willingness to show, the willingness to grow, with the willingness to know what you don't know." So I would invite people to explore in their moments of self-reflection as well as organizational reflection to show that willingness to grow as well as the humility and that accountability piece around being willing to admit when you don't know something, maybe a sp- about a specific culture, a specific identity, and lean into those moments and opportunities for growth.

So I would invite leaders, staff, folks at all levels and all types of organizations to be able to do that.

And those growth opportunities are not always comfortable.

You may have all sorts of feelings about them as well.

Tip Fallon offers up an invitation to lean into being fully human and feel those feelings