This is a sobering time of unprecedented change for all of us who work for the health of our communities and the health of the Earth that sustains us.
The incoming Trump Administration has caused major disruptions in the federal government over the last few weeks. First with the Executive Orders targeting climate solutions and DEI efforts. Then came last week’s order for federal agencies to put all federal funds disbursements on hold. Despite the order being rescinded, many federal agencies are “on hold” with grant monies, especially those connected with the Inflation Reduction Act. We know that the uncertainty about federal revenue sources has begun to impact decisions by our partners in nonprofits, government, academia, and businesses at the state and local levels.
In this climate, your leadership carries special weight and responsibility. When the ground shifts below your feet, how do you lead? How do you center your mission for the long term while also focusing on the immediate work in front of you?
As we did during the Covid-19 Pandemic, we invite you to step into a proactive leadership posture. We encourage you to explore and use an adaptive leadership stance.
The spirit of these principles and practices, advanced by Ronald Heifetz, helps create an environment in which teams, entities, and networks can nimbly respond to complex issues and change.
Here are four specific adaptive leadership strategies for you to consider using in the coming weeks and months:
1. Scout and Scan Your Environment –
In a time of rapid change, knowledge is power. As a leader, you can encourage your team to “scout and scan” the current environment for news, emerging realities, and trends that will impact your collaborations or your organization.
From an adaptive leadership perspective, the current times demand a hyper-application of a leader’s work to “get on the balcony” instead of being on the dance floor. Without joint efforts to scout for “what’s out there,” you might be tempted to rely on your singular and more narrow perspective.
Collective knowledge fuels collective wisdom and strategy. Scanning for current information provides you and your team with information that allows you to accurately diagnose the situation and understand the challenges and opportunities.
Methods to scout and scan might include:
- Seek out peers and partners for brief and informal conversations – Reach out via texts, brief phone calls, or side conversations at gatherings to ask others about what they are seeing. Keep a log of what you hear. Periodically review the log and look for patterns.
- Structure conversations to gather information – As you work with other staff, board members, collaborations, and networks, use a variety of strategies to gather the stories, perceptions, and impacts of current changes. This might look like:
- Short openers or icebreakers at regular meetings asking people’s observations or how the headlines influence their work,
- A focused special discussion, even for 30 to 45 minutes, which can yield data and a stronger sense of camaraderie, and,
- Pulling together focused discussions with targeted groups that generate information and help build connections within the group.
- Ask for feedback – Remind and invite those closest to you—your staff, board, or allies–to share information. A simple survey or open invitation to your members or partners can also quickly provide real stories and change impacts. For example, we noted that in one network, there was a recent call for examples of how projects already in motion were impacted by stalled or paused funding to create real stories to share with decision-makers.
- Use collaborative documents or tools—You might create a shared document or chat thread dedicated to sharing information. This helps to catalog and track what you are hearing. This type of document (Options: Google Docs, Zoom whiteboard, Miro Board, or Padlet) could be used as a “live” document in a meeting and/or serve as an ongoing way to share and organize information.
2. Increase Proactive Communication
In times of uncertainty, silence from you, the leader creates a void that might be filled with anxieties, fears, or misunderstood information. More communication from you helps to keep everyone grounded, connected, and more certain.
Whatever your position in your organization or collaborative, you can proactively lead by finding ways to keep everyone informed and keeping lines of communication open. Within your network or organization, look for ways to keep the dialogue open. Small gestures to “touch” or “tap” colleagues can keep information flowing and give you information about how people are really doing. Clearly articulating plans for actions, specific next steps, or highlighting good news can all help assure others that there are pathways forward.
In addition to internal communication, pay attention to communicating with your wider network of partners, donors, members, contractors, or vendors. Maybe there are ways to both broadcast what you know and ask for feedback that will support future strategies. We’ve observed that many groups have been proactively communicating with members and donors, and they make specific asks for donations or support amid big change events.
- Here’s one example of an email message from Forth, a nonprofit whose mission is to electrify transportation by bringing people together to create solutions that reduce pollution and barriers to access.
- Here’s a handy tip sheet on communication strategies during times of change: Crisis Communication for Nonprofits — Small Shop Strategies
3. Experiment with New Strategies –
Adaptive leadership uses a “let’s try” and “let’s experiment” approach to your entity making strategic shifts. As with scientific experiments, defining something to try based on your summary of needs (hypothesis) will guide the new activities you want to test. In the current environment, the idea will be to:
- Utilize what you learned from the scout and scan processes,
- Identify some specific themes you are seeing in the current set of needs and conditions,
- Choose some things to try out to address the needs and conditions.
You could borrow a page from the process of Design Thinking to choose and craft potential experiments. Typically, in design thinking you use data to generate a long list of potential ideas that might answer the question, “How might we respond to X and Y needs?” Then use criteria that will help you choose from the options your team dreams up.
One of the key criteria for early tests is to choose experiments that need few resources and are low risk if they fail. As an example, let’s say that because of changes in the federal budget you’ve identified a future strategy that might be jeopardized because of iffy funding; what might be low-risk and low-resource ways to test out the interest of other funding sources now?
By experimenting, you will gain more than if you don’t try something new. As with all experiments, run it for a given time, and then evaluate it. Learn from successes and use those lessons to support your next experiment or strategy. And especially learn from the things you try that are partial or complete failures. Often, the most useful lessons for your success in the long haul will surface from the flops. Take some leaps, do some things that may be risky or new, and see what you can learn in this turbulent time.
4. Pay attention to your bottom lines – for your team and your entity’s sustainability
We know that for many of us—who have been working on a range of environmental, conservation, environmental justice, and community health issues—the last few weeks of the new Trump Administration have been trying and difficult. It has been a time of dual threat to our organizations and our collaborations, as well as to many of us personally.
Here are a few additional resources that might be helpful as you work to take care of yourself, your team, and the health of your organization.
- Self-Care Strategies – It’s very hard to effectively lead others when you personally are off-balance, distracted, feeling under attack, or running on fumes. Please take care of yourself first. Here are a few good reminders about the basics of self-care and coping tips for traumatic events.
- Show Care for Your Colleagues and Peers – Know that the current list of threats coming from the Trump Administration impacts the people around you. And the list of threats is long right now — efforts working against climate change mitigation and resilience, reversing efforts for diversity and equity and inclusion, direct threats for people of color, general and legal threats for LGBTQIA people, mass deportations, challenges to women’s choices for their health care. You may or may not be feeling these threats personally, but as a leader, there’s a lot you can do to create space in one-on-one exchanges and within the group to acknowledge feelings and encourage others to care for themselves.
- Adaptive Planning – Your team’s adaptive collective thinking is critical for your entity’s current and long-term work. We recommend adaptive approaches such as LaPiana Consulting’s Nonprofit Scenario Planning in an Age of Chaos. We also offer two ICL resources published in past times of significant change — Managing in Hard Times and the MacMillan Matrix. Use resources like these to shape candid conversations that help your group understand its bottom lines for values, strategies, and budget decisions.
In closing, please know that the ICL Team is here for you. If you have additional resources to share with others, specific needs that we might be able to support in an experiment, or you need coaching or help designing and leading important conversations, please let us know!
Additional resources: