Staying Whole & Well Within Nonprofit Leadership

There is so much loneliness and stress in nonprofit leadership. Many leaders struggle with supporting staff through major landscape shifts while also needing to tout successes to board members, and still advocating for addressing the organization’s unmet needs. I experienced it personally through many years as a CEO and executive director and see it so often in leaders I work with.

If you are feeling that struggle, here are 3 things you can do.

1)     Connect with your counterparts. I know you already have a lot to do, but creating a network of counterparts outside your organization can be endlessly helpful professionally and personally and will give you some space for safe commiseration. Set up one coffee meeting and let things take off from there.

2)     Define your success. You have a lot of success measures thrust upon you or that were reached in compromise – things you inherited from an old strategic plan, funder metrics, board dashboards. Know what success means to you, and chart that progress for yourself. It can be about wins for your organization, but also skills you want to gain or things you want to have tried professionally. Being able to chart progress for your own professional journey can help the work continue to feel rewarding when your organization is struggling.

3)     Know what you need. Sometimes we lose sight of what it takes for us to feel good at work, and sources of needless discomfort slip into our routines like pebbles into a shoe. Think about what makes you feel best at work (within your current job or remembering back to a previous position), and where your current pain points are. What are/were the key elements in your routine or experience that made you feel good? How can you introduce those elements back into your work and eliminate some of those things that are causing needless stress? Giving a little mindfulness to the questions can work wonders in helping you improve a situation and in determining when a situation is not right for you.

No one wins when the most valuable resource of the social impact sector – people -- is compromised. As you set off to create better conditions through your mission work, don’t lose sight of doing it for you too.