|
|
Notes for
the by Paul Pribbenow, Ph.D. |
|
|
Philanthropy is a journey. Let JGA be your guide. Johnson, Grossnickle and
Associates LLC
|
Volume
Three, Number Four (April 2002) ****** "What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how." (W. Wordsworth, from "The Prelude") NOTES FROM READERS >>What you think<< You will note from my
email address that I am now in residence at Rockford College.
Things go well…I’m having fun.
My thanks to all of you who sent along your congratulations and
good wishes on my new position – it will be a fine adventure.
I am grateful to the computer folks at Wabash College, who have
given me permission to keep our list on their servers (at least for the
time being). Please send
any replies or requests to me at paul_pribbenow@rockford.edu,
even though our list name still bears the wabash.edu suffix. As I look at the
contents of this issue of Notes, I can’t help but reflect on how what
I am reading and thinking about in preparation for my new role has
shaped what I wish to share with you. Bear with me if my focus is a bit more targeted than usual
– let me know whether or not you think I’m headed in the right
direction. You can be my
“kitchen cabinet.” I think that this
glimpse into contemporary theologian-historian Patrick Henry’s book, The
Ironic Christian’s Companion, as excerpted by Martin Marty,
offers a motto of sorts for our efforts at reflective practice:
Henry’s mother-in-law, saying grace before a meal in which she meant
to ask God to ‘make us ever mindful of the needs of others,’ asked
God instead to ‘make us ever needful of the minds of others.’
I thought her prayer a helpful and appropriate reminder that
reflective practice is common work. My family, which has a
longstanding tradition of bowling (together) each Christmas, will
appreciate this tidbit: From a National Public Radio listener, as
reported on Weekend
All Things Considered (February 10, 2002).
Life lessons I learned from bowling…(1) Always take turns; (2)
Splits happen; (3) Your ball may go in the gutter – which is not a
good thing – but the ball always is returned to you and you get
another chance; (4) You can switch lanes but it won’t make any
difference – you need to correct your mistakes where you are; and (5)
You can stand on the left or the right! Occasionally, I (or my
colleagues) refer to items from previous issues of Notes.
If you have not been a subscriber previously, and wish to review
our conversations, past issues of Notes are available on-line at www.jgacounsel.com.
The website version of Notes also includes helpful hyperlinks to
sources for purchasing or subscribing to the various publications
mentioned in Notes. I
thank my friends at Johnson, Grossnickle and
Associates for their abiding support for our reflective practice. ****** REFLECT
ON THIS >>Leadership
and inner work<< As is clear from past
issues of Notes, I am a great fan of Parker
Palmer, whose writing on education, vocation, and public service is
visionary. In a recent
issue of Leader
to Leader (Fall 2001), Palmer sat for an interview with
management consultant, L. J. Rittenhouse, who asked some tough questions
about Palmer’s positions on leadership.
Let’s listen in. Rittenhouse:
Examining one’s life requires one to pay attention to
emotions and feelings, as well as to one’s thoughts and intellect.
Aren’t leaders supposed to restrain their personal realities to
be effective? Palmer:
No, the best leaders work from a place of integrity in themselves, from
their hearts. If they
don’t, they can’t inspire trustful relationships.
In the absence of trust, organizations fall apart. Rittenhouse:
I’m not sure I agree with your observation.
I’ve seen plenty of businesses where leaders are not endowed
with the ability to inspire trust and their organizations aren’t
falling apart. Palmer:
As the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker said, “If it
ain’t in your heart, it ain’t in your horn.” We can hear the horns everywhere, but if they’re not being
played from the heart, then certain negative consequences follow.
I know from experience inside corporations and large-scale
organizations that everybody is sizing up the leader and asking, “Is
this a divided person or a person of integrity?
Is what we see what we get?
Is he the same on the inside as on the outside?”…When the
answer is, “No…” then things start to fall apart…I have just
described an unsafe situation…and what do people do in unsafe
situations? They start
hiding out. They start
faking it. They start
giving less of what they have to give.
They start playing it close to the vest.
An organization may “work” under these conditions but simply
cannot function at anywhere near full effectiveness… Rittenhouse:
So even if I accept this expanded view of the heart, what do you
say to those who see power resulting from control and domination? Palmer:
Look at history…history shows again and again how people who
might be regarded as “weak” have used the power of the human heart.
History shows how they have taken hope and vision on the one hand
and anger and fury on the other to create real and massive
transformation…How did (Nelson)
Mandela, (Vaclav) Havel,
and (Rosa)
Parks decide to live “divided no more”? I believe they all came
to understand that no external punishment could possibly be worse than
the punishment we impose on ourselves by conspiring in our diminishment. Rittenhouse:
A lot of people see leaders as disconnected, because to survive
they need large egos. If
leaders are caught up within their own egos, how can they be open to
differences in people and in their world? Palmer:
I don’t think they can. Having
a big ego is actually antithetical to both leadership and survival.
I think a particular vulnerability makes relationships
possible—especially with otherness…Great leaders make themselves
vulnerable to a wide range of voices, especially to those who don’t
fit their preconceptions…When I’m sitting with someone whose
worldview is not familiar to me and who therefore seems threatening to
my ego because I don’t get it, there’s a lot of inner work to be
done simply to calm myself and say, “Stay open, listen, don’t rush
to judgment, and ask good questions that will evoke this person further.
Try to understand.”… That’s spiritual discipline.
It has nothing to do with floating off into some other dimension.
It has a lot to do with getting your feet more firmly on the
ground in the real world. There’s much more to
the interview, which I encourage you to read.
Suffice to say that Palmer’s vision of the interrelatedness of
inner work, leadership, and relationships/ organizations of integrity is
much on my mind these days – and I hope on yours as well. >>Gandhi and political engagement<< Rockford
College is known in part for its strong commitment to service
learning, linking classroom work with service in the community.
The college is a longtime member of Campus
Compact, an organization that supports service-learning initiatives
on college campuses around the country.
A recent issue of “Campus
Compact Reader: Service Learning and Civic Education” (Fall 2001)
includes a fascinating essay entitled “Political
Engagement and Service-Learning: A Gandhian Perspective” by
Dilafruz Williams, a professor at Portland
State University. Williams suggests that Mahatma
Gandhi offers us a set of abiding principles and perspectives that
might inform our efforts to help encourage participation in our
democracy – the wider meaning of political engagement. First, Gandhi teaches
us to develop personal authenticity and integrity.
“My life is a message,” Gandhi wrote in his autobiography –
and so are ours. How responsible are we for reflecting on the links between
who we are and what we do? What
messages do our lives send? Second, Gandhi offers
us a model of promoting communities and community relationships that are
both thin and thick. This
is a wonderful tension in our efforts to encourage participation in our
common lives. On the one hand, we want folks to have glimpses into good
work, so we invite people to special events and give them a quick
overview on the work of the organization.
For example, last night I attended a banquet for the Golden
Apple Foundation and I got a limited view of their work promoting
quality education in our community.
This is an example of a “thin” relationship.
But this limited view, while valuable, is not enough to encourage
genuine participation, so we also want people to volunteer, to get
involved in very deep ways in the life and work of a cause or
organization. The balance
between introducing people to good work and actually engaging them in
that work is the tension between thin and thick relationships.
Live in the tension, Gandhi taught us. Finally, Gandhi also
advocated the development of capacity for political engagement by
immersing ourselves in the work of the body politic.
Williams suggests that there are three criteria for building
capacity: (1) We must learn how to deliberate in public – skills of
deliberation must go beyond personal opinion – and the possibility of
a healthy democracy counts on our ability to think and disagree and
reach consensus together, in public.
(2) We must learn to balance passionate advocacy with
dispassionate listening. One
of the history professors here at Rockford recently told me how she
struggles in her women’s history course to encourage both the
intellectual engagement that comes from passionate feelings about
injustices and the listening to each other (especially across gender
boundaries) that will allow us to find a common way.
(3) We must practice nonviolent conflict resolution.
Any form of violence is anathema to healthy common work, but
conflict is inevitable (and can be healthy).
So, how do we teach ourselves to work it out, disagree
constructively, air our feelings and disagreements, but do so in a
nonviolent fashion? We must practice. I find this perspective
on political engagement to be a very helpful lens through which to look
at participation in any sort of common endeavor, be it a college
community, a museum, a nonprofit social service agency, a hospital, or
community group. How do we
learn from Gandhi as we seek to be authentic, balance various sorts of
community relationships, and build the capacity and skills we need to
fashion healthy, engaged communities? ****** PRACTICE
THIS >>Meaningful
work<< It seems that there are
many folks out there who share my concerns about how we might understand
work as meaningful. Two
recent books provide helpful maps to our efforts to both understand and
practice meaningful work. Organizational theorist
Charles Handy writes in his The
Elephant and the Flea: Reflections of a Reluctant Capitalist
(Harvard Business School Press, 2002), that his wife asked him shortly
after they were married whether he was proud of his work, to which Handy
replied, “It’s all right, as work goes.”
His wife, Elizabeth, then looked hard at him and said; “I
don’t think I want to spend the rest of my life with someone who is
prepared to settle for all right.”
Handy’s reflection on this conversation leads him to consider
what sorts of organizational contexts might offer the best possibility
for meaningful work. He
makes a distinction between working for the large corporation (“the
elephant”) or for the small, independent contractor (“the flea”),
and suggests that the tension between those two organizational contexts
teaches us important lessons about ourselves, the economy, and what it
means to be happy (in the broadest sense) while working. In a different vein,
psychologists Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William
Damon, in their book Good
Work: Where Excellence and Ethics Meet (Basic Books, 2001), talk
about the psychology of good work, by which they mean (1) work that
exhibits a high level of expertise; and (2) work that entails regular
concern with the implications and applications of an individual’s work
for the wider world. They
try to name what is good work, how individuals succeed or fail in their
efforts to do good work, especially as our current social milieu may
offer both opportunities and obstacles to good work.
Their findings are fascinating and worth reviewing.
Their challenges are worth taking seriously: (1) Define the
mission of your work – why do you do what you do? (2) Identify role
models – both those who inspire us and those who lead us to want to do
things differently. (3) Take the mirror test.
Are you proud or embarrassed by what you see in the mirror each
morning? What do others
think of you? How does your
profession pass the mirror test? Here’s to our good
work! >>Philanthropic
policies<< I’ve recently been
involved as an outside member of an American
Association of Museums panel, which has been charged with drafting
an ethics statement concerning philanthropic support from individual
donors for museums across the country.
It was a fascinating process, well managed and illustrative of a
real commitment to helping museums build their own capacities for
ethical reflection and policy setting.
I couldn’t be more concerned about this sort of reflection
among all nonprofit organizations. I therefore was pleased
to read two articles in a recent issue of Trusteeship
(July/August 2001), a magazine published by the Association
of Governing Boards, challenging organizations to develop clear
policies on stewardship and on board responsibilities related to
philanthropy. On stewardship, authors
Mary Jane McDonald and Lyn Barrows Boone (both of Denison
University) argue that spelling out a policy on recognition policies
can provide unambiguous directives that define institutional
expectations and give structure to its relationship with donors.
The policy needs to be adopted by the board so that both
institutional representatives and donors know that the structure of such
arrangements is of interest and concern at the highest levels of the
organization. Such a policy
can help minimize internal politics, especially when a gift may cause
one constituency or another to feel slighted.
A stewardship policy is the right thing to do, recognizing the
need to document institutional memory and help the board fulfill its
fiduciary responsibilities. On the board’s role
in philanthropy, author Richard Legon suggests that the process of
drafting a written statement of board policy on philanthropy helps to
ensure that board members have been challenged to consider six important
questions about their fundraising responsibilities:
****** PAY
ATTENTION TO THIS >>Some
new resources<< A few new sources for
your reflective practice. One of my projects
during the past several months in my capacity as a senior consultant for
Johnson, Grossnickle and Associates, was to help
with the creation and initial publishing of a newsletter entitled “Common
Work,” occasional notes on issues and trends in philanthropy.
Our first two issues – the first on the concept of common work
in light of the post-September 11 circumstances and the second on
prospect management – offer a glimpse into the range of interests and
topics the newsletter hopes to address in coming issues.
To subscribe, please contact eva@jgacounsel.com. I’ve been on a couple
of book and research prize juries this year, and have had the privilege
to review many fine new books and monographs.
I especially commend one book for your professional libraries:
Lilya Wagner’s Careers
in Fundraising (AFP/Wiley Fund Development Series, 2002), a
terrific guide to our burgeoning profession. Robert Sevier, Vice
President for Research and Marketing at Stamats
Communications, writing in QuickTakes
(vol. 5, no. 6), lists movies that Inc.
magazine readers selected as the best sources of lessons for leadership
and management. If you are
like me, and always at a bit of a loss in the local Blockbuster,
consider these flicks: Apollo
13, The
Bridge on the River Kwai, Dead
Poets Society, Elizabeth,
Glengarry
Glen Ross, It’s
a Wonderful Life, Norma
Rae, One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Twelve
Angry Men, and Twelve
O’Clock High. After
you’ve worked through the list, go to www2.inc.com/search/17290.html
for Inc.’s commentary on the movies. >>Hope<< I heard a thoughtful
sermon recently, in which the preacher suggested that so-called
“Doubting Thomas,” the disciple who needed to touch Jesus before he
would accept that he was risen, was not so much full of doubt as he was
bereft of hope. The death
of Jesus had left him hopeless. The
preacher suggested that we, too, are people who, though we may claim to
doubt or be cynical about whether there is any transcendent or broader
meaning to our lives, what we may actually lack is hope. As I take up my new
duties here at Rockford College, I am acutely aware of the need for me
to find and offer others hope about our common future.
To that end, I return to Maya Angelou’s stirring poem, “On
the Pulse of the Morning,” written for the first Clinton
inauguration, a moment of great hope for many of us…here are some
excerpts: *** “Here, root yourselves beside me. I am that Tree planted by the River, Which will not be moved. I, the Rock, I, the River, I, the Tree I am yours—your passages have been paid. Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need For this bright morning dawning for you. History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage, need not be lived again. Lift up your eyes Upon this day breaking for you. Give birth again To the dream. Women, children, men. Take it into the palms of your hands, Mold it into the shape of your most Private need. Sculpt it into The image of your most public self. Life up your hearts Each new hour holds new chances For a new beginning. Do not be wedded forever To fear, yoked eternally To brutishness. ***** Here on the pulse of this new day You may have the grace to look up and out And into your sister’s eyes, And into your brother’s face, Your country, And say simply Very simply With hope— Good morning. >>Subscription
information<< Subscriptions to Notes
are simple to establish. Send
me an email at paul_pribbenow@rockford.edu,
ask to be added to the list, and you will receive a confirmation from
the mail server at Wabash College
that you are on the list. Please
feel free to forward your email versions of Notes to others—they then
can subscribe by contacting me. The
current and archive issues of Notes are available on-line at www.jgacounsel.com. >>Topics
for the next issue (June 2002)<< * The vices and virtues of organizations * A meditation on mixed
motivations (c) Paul Pribbenow, 2002 |
|
