Meeting With Peers

This is a good article from Stanford Social Innovation Review, touching on an important resource and fortunately, it is one available in Sacramento at the Nonprofit Resource Center ED Network, and here is their October meeting agenda.

An excerpt from the article

“We recently conducted a focus group with nonprofit CEOs in New York City. Given all the recent research that points to the value of peer-to-peer support for nonprofit leaders, we wanted to know why so little of this is done online. One CEO immediately responded, “We don’t have time.”

“The facilitator of the focus group was taken aback. “How do you have time to come to this two-hour focus group but don’t have the time to go online?”

“The leaders in the room saw the return on investment for a well-organized meeting with their peers to be much greater than anything they could do in the digital commons. They were more confident that they would get actionable insight into management techniques. But perhaps more importantly, the meeting provided an emotional and psychological benefit that is rarely met: a space for candid conversation about successes and failures in a safe, supportive environment. (highlighting added)

“Face-to-face conversations with other leaders—commercial and nonprofit—remind us that failure is, in fact, the norm and does not preclude success.

“If [CEOs’ successes] were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100,” Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz recently wrote on TechCrunch. “This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging…because nobody tells you that the mean is 22.”

“If the buck stops at the CEO, every failure in our organization ends up piled on my desk—whether it’s a typo on the website, a bad hire, or a missed market opportunity. After just a week, the failures stack up so high that it is hard to see past the mountain of complaints.”