{"id":22641,"date":"2019-04-11T13:37:03","date_gmt":"2019-04-11T20:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=22641"},"modified":"2019-04-11T13:37:03","modified_gmt":"2019-04-11T20:37:03","slug":"daring-to-lead-in-philanthropy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/daring-to-lead-in-philanthropy\/","title":{"rendered":"Daring to lead in philanthropy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Hats off to Jason for putting Bren\u00e9 Brown\u2019s Dare to Lead<\/em> at the end of another semester of study, smack dab in the middle of when most of us are feeling exhausted, dry, and depleted. I know I am! It\u2019s a great reminder of the qualities that I need to nurture in my own leadership, and of how far I have yet to travel.<\/p>\n

At the beginning of this semester, I took on a new challenge in my consultancy work and agreed to assist our local university in its development efforts following the departure of the former president. I stepped outside my comfort zone and agreed to assisting in a bit of a crisis moment for the school. I saw it as a matter of being a good neighbour and raise money for the institution or sit back and watch the university die before your eyes. Our management team had to raise donation revenue and increase fall enrollment. Time was short, and yes, it really was that serious. Board meetings this weekend will determine how successful we have been.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad I dared to lead, and things seem to be turning around (God willing), but the demands of this semester have messed up my own balance, rhythms, and stability. Sometimes life\u2019s like that. We know what we should do for emotional and spiritual health, but we get off track when surprising demands crop up and life gets way too intense. I say all this to preface this week\u2019s post with the admission that I am depleted. I dropped the self-protective barriers and dared to became vulnerable.<\/p>\n

This contrast between armored leadership and daring leadership is one which Brown highlights in her research.[1]<\/a> Consider the self-protection mechanisms Brown names: perfectionism, numbing, hustling, weaponizing fear, and avoiding. In contrast, she enthuses about the vulnerability of empathy, gratitude, learning, embracing diversity, and leading from the heart. As I read through this section, I was reminded of Richard Rohr and his description of the difference between a false self and the true self. The false self attends to the ego\u2019s needs, and is a voracious consumer, while the true self is learning to let go. Rohr\u2019s true\/false selves is another lens to use when considering Brown\u2019s vulnerability approach.<\/p>\n

Rohr states, \u201cMeister Eckhart, the German Dominican mystic (c.1260-c.1328), said that spirituality has much more to do with subtraction than it does with addition. Yet our culture, both secular and Christian, seems obsessed with addition: getting rich, becoming famous, earning more brownie points with God or our boss, attaining enlightenment, achieving moral behavior. Jesus and the mystics of other traditions tell us that the spiritual path is not about getting more or getting ahead, which only panders to the ego. Authentic spirituality is much more about letting go\u2014letting go of what we don\u2019t need, although we don\u2019t know that at first\u2026. Once we\u2019re connected to our Source, we know that our isolated, seemingly inferior or superior individual self is not that big a deal. The more we cling to self-importance and ego, the more we are undoubtedly living outside of union.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

I see yet another correlation to Brown\u2019s leadership model in the work of Ronald Heifitz from Harvard Business School. His adaptive leadership approach, like Brown\u2019s, is one that does not seek position nor authority with a command-and-control approach, but rather leads from the side. One of the books I\u2019m reading for my research is Do More Than Give: The Six Practices of Donors Who Change the World<\/em>. This work encourages the use of Heifitz\u2019 approach as applied to philanthropy. I see this approach as especially well-suited to next generation givers who are the focus of my research.<\/p>\n

Adaptive leadership will go against the grain of how philanthropy is normally conducted. The authors state, \u201cMany donors have long tended to adopt a low profile and shy away from controversy. But when they are leading adaptively, they must learn to influence those beyond their control\u2026 [T]his work requires a time commitment that is much longer than the typical grant cycle \u2013 often requiring years of sustained effort before any conclusive results are known.\u201d[3]<\/a> Moving into adaptive leadership as a funder requires abandoning one\u2019s reserve and comfortable place of privilege, learning to open up to conversations and opportunities, and becoming part of the solution rather than resting on the sidelines of society writing cheques with lots of zeroes.<\/p>\n

\u201cCatalytic donors are inordinately influential \u2013 not because they hold the formal authority afforded to leaders who hold a C-suite title at a corporation or a high military rank but because they are adaptive leaders. They see social and environmental problems for what they are \u2013 emergent, complex phenomena that require adaptive responses, rather than issues that can be resolves simply by making a grant to a nonprofit.\u201d[4]<\/a> Philanthropists can be catalytic, but they must dare to lead and not just assume that sending money is enough.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Bren\u00e9 Brown, Dare to Lead<\/em> (London: Vermillion 2018), 76-77.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation website, \u201cLetting Go of the False Self\u201d, December 12, 2017, accessed on April 11, 2019, https:\/\/cac.org\/letting-go-false-self-2017-12-12\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Leslie Crutchfield, John Kania, and Mark Kramer, Do More Than Give: The Six Practices of Donors Who Change the World <\/em>(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), 160.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid.<\/em>, 220.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hats off to Jason for putting Bren\u00e9 Brown\u2019s Dare to Lead at the end of another semester of study, smack dab in the middle of when most of us are feeling exhausted, dry, and depleted. I know I am! It\u2019s a great reminder of the qualities that I need to nurture in my own leadership, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1517],"class_list":["post-22641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-brown","cohort-lgp8"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22641"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22644,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22641\/revisions\/22644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}