Ham Up!

Ask not what you can do for your country. 

Ask what’s for lunch. 

 – Orson Welles

If you are an up and comer, a bright little nova about to burst in the sky, one of next year’s Forty Under Forty, then you’re making a big mistake if you work through lunch.  Oh, I hear you.  You have tons of work to do.  You like working through lunch because everyone else in the office is gone and it’s really nice and quiet.  You don’t want a reputation for taking long lunch hours.

Yes, I hear you, but you’ve got this one wrong. 

When I worked for Milwaukee County as their first Grants Coordinator, I’d just come from an agency where lunch was an art form.  However, in the County Courthouse, lunch meant going down the elevator to the Homicide: Life on the Streets cafeteria, eating a tuna sandwich and hotfooting upstairs before your minutes were up.  So when I headed for the elevator and got off on the 1st Floor to walk outside into the sunshine and the vast array of eateries around 9th and Wells, people piped up real quick, “Where are you going?”

Well, I’m going to lunch.  Why was I going to lunch?

Because I needed to make connections in order to get some big grants going and the place that connections could get made was LUNCH.

Yes, I could have had meetings with the same people.  But a meeting isn’t like lunch.  A meeting is about the agenda, getting things done, leaving with assignments, and feeling super efficient.  Lunch is about having a relationship with someone that is bigger than a single project, a connection that is more enduring, more intimate, and more fruitful over the long term. It’s talking about your kids, it’s knowing that someone actually has kids, it’s sharing information about new developments, it’s cracking a joke and having a decent laugh, it’s building a business friendship for the long haul.  Valuable stuff.

Like many of you, I tend to work through lunch (and I actually had a tuna sandwich today) but I know about the value of lunch and intend to recommit myself to this essential business practice.  So – get on the phone and make a date for lunch!  And I’ll do the same.

And, oh, kudos to the County’s old dungeon of a cafeteria – because it used to open at 5:00 a.m. which let folks like me who’d spent their working hours at lunch come in early to get their work done.

Quick Tip #1: Protect Your Meeting from Hijackers

Facilitating a group meeting, especially about a thorny subject, opens the door for hijacking if you’re not careful.  A meeting hijacking is when someone with a very strong point of view starts off the group discussion, setting a negative tone and direction for the meeting.  When this happens, other group members who are less willing to be vocal shrink before your very eyes.  They become spectators rather than participants.  It’s not pretty.

Here’s one way to avoid a hijacking. 

1.  Prepare for the meeting by developing THREE KEY QUESTIONS.  For example: “How did this report help you better understand this problem in Milwaukee.”  “What concerns raised by the report need to be addressed in the next revision?”  “What are three ways we could improve our system moving forward?”

2.  Start the meeting by asking each person – on their own/with no discussion – to provide written answers to the questions. 

3.  Open the discussion by going from person to person to get their responses.  As facilitator, use your ability to tie ideas together and to suggest other areas for consideration.

4. Continue to ask for elaboration, new ideas, while keeping the general framework of the questions as the agenda for the meeting.

Why this works:

• The action of writing one’s ideas down on paper empowers people.  If they write an idea down, they want to be sure to express it.  It becomes more valuable to them.
• If there is a potential hijacker in the room, his/her ideas become equal to everyone else’s.  The imperative of the ‘paper’ means that all ideas must be heard.  This makes it very awkward to monopolize the conversation.
• The strategy reduces the likelihood that the group will take off on an unproductive tangent.  The facilitator can always bring people back to the key questions.
• Participants’ written answers are ready-made notes of the meeting.  It’s not necessary but I ask people to identify themselves on these little surveys and it helps later when I want to seek clarification.

 This works for me and I’ve used it in some pretty touchy situations.  Let me know what you think.

Hair on Fire

This is my 100th Wilberg Community Planning blog post.  So I figured it needed to be really good.  Deeply meaningful.  Something people will print out and carry in their wallets. 

But it’s not going to be because what I’m thinking about is ‘hair on fire.’  Hair on fire, to me, is about professional hysteria.  It’s about people who should know better going around the bend about a problem – usually before they have all the facts, before they’ve talked to anyone, and before they’ve taken 30 seconds to reason things out.  Hair on fire people (HOFP) can generate a lot of upsetness and take up a lot of time.

Here are 5 ways you can tell if you’re a HOFP:

1. You can’t wait to tell people about a problem and when you do, you make it just a titch bigger than it was when you first discovered it.  A big part of ‘hair on fire’ is thinking you have to be Paul Revere, that you have to get on your horse and start tearing through town spreading the news before anyone else.

2.  You want to make the problem so important and world-changing that it requires a whole group to solve it.  ‘Hair on fire’ is no fun all by your lonesome.  You really need a circle of nodding heads and at least one or two people whose reactions will be more extreme than yours so you look like a moderate.

3. You think that the distance between the situation and the end of the world is less than 5 yards.  When your hair’s on fire, you are convinced that the worst case scenario is staring you in the face.  And you kind of like that idea. 

 4.  You keep gathering evidence to stoke the fire. When you’ve got that ‘hair on fire’ thing going, everything  seems to be related to your problem.  You get gum on your shoe and you find a way to connect it to your calamity.

5.  The problem turns out to be nothing.  Eventually, even if you can’t because you’re a HOFP, someone will take a deep breath and figure out that the tornado actually isn’t headed this way and besides that, it’s petered out to a strong wind.  It’s sad not to have a crisis but 99% of the time, there’s no crisis.  No reason for hair on fire.  Demoralizing for the HOFP.

The whole ‘hair on fire’ thing would just be entertainment for a group if it didn’t take up so much time and often have repercussions way beyond the moment. When people buy into the panic, they do extreme and often dumb stuff they wouldn’t otherwise do. Sometimes, they end up paying for it for a long time.

Know any HOFP?  Give them my 100th blog post to carry in their wallet.

10 Reasons You’re an Idiot if Your Nonprofit Isn’t Visible on Social Media

There are still nonprofit executives and development directors who think social media is a toy they don’t have time for.

If you’re one of these folks, here are 10 reasons why you’re an idiot:

1.  A nonprofit that is out of sight is also out of mind.

2.  The seat you haven’t taken at the social media table is occupied by someone else who is more eager and more savvy.

3.  Elected officials use social media to get their message out and to understand the world of their constituents, but, oh, you don’t want to be part of that world.

4.  People stopped reading their mail a long time ago – that’s why the U.S. Postal Service is in so much trouble.

5.  Connected people are almost always connected but if you’re not connectable, they ain’t connecting to you.

6. You know who you know but you don’t know who you don’t know but it’s those folks who might be looking for someone like you, but instead they’ll find someone like your competitor.

7. The world is hip, fast, sophisticated.  It’s not drafted, edited, reviewed, refined, and published.  Sorry.  If you can’t function well on the fly, you’re probably in the wrong business. 

8.  Funders are using social media.  And I don’t mean funding organizations.  I mean people.  Oh yes,  people who work at foundations or local government use social media as individuals which gives you a chance to get to know them as people. And, here’s a thought, they get to know you as a person as well instead of Ms. Perpetualhandout.

9. Social media gives supporters an instant brochure that can change every day.  An example: So I’m on your board, I believe in your work…..what if all I can do is point an interested donor to a website that hasn’t changed since the Stone Age.  Is this going to yield money, donations, connections, relationships?

10. And the last reason why you’re an idiot if your nonprofit isn’t visible on social media?  You are telling a huge and growing part of the community – people who use social media as their principal means of communication – that YOU DON’T CARE about connecting with them.  Sorry.  It’s harsh.  But it’s true.

Seriously.

Joy on a Tree Trunk

Would you put the word joy and your work in the same sentence?  Last week, I had occasion to meet several people whose obvious joy in their work surprised, pleased and heartened me.  It also made me want to give them money. 

No joke. 

I loved these folks for being so happy in their work and, here’s what really came through and was so impressive — for finding joy in working with people who most of us would see as very tough customers.  What came across was energy and interest.  Enthusiasm and pride.  And pride not just in their own work but in the successes of the people they serve.  It’s contagious – like a great cause.  Like how the pink ribbons and the cute pink running shoes and the story about how Susan G. Komen’s sister decided to go raise some damn money for breast cancer research just makes any normal woman get herself off the couch and marching down the street – that kind of enthusiasm and pride.

As it happens, the folks I talked to last week were working with people with disabilities, serious mental illness, and extreme poverty. They beamed when they talked about their work.  So much so I wondered if they went home at night or just took occasional naps and sipped Gatorade to stay on the job 24/7.

The hard thing is that it’s impossible to manufacture this kind of joy.  People either have it or they don’t.  The people who have it, though, have a magic that’s pretty special.  If you’re one of these people or you run an organization and you have a beamer on staff — you’re lucky.  You not only have the joy — you have a great big, wonderful magnet.

Use it.

Social Media: Does It Work For You?

I have a couple Facebook friends whose posts have turned me against causes I was formerly for.  Well, maybe that’s an extreme statement.  But you know what I mean?  The constant picketing, call to arms, re-posts of political articles.  Eh. At the same time, there are nonprofits, a couple that I know and love, whose posts are stiff and uninviting, posts where I can tell that a committee thought long and hard about just how to phrase their next message.  Another eh.

But there’s the opposite, too.  I have Facebook friends that post amazingly well-worded, often funny, sometimes poignant statuses.  And I follow a bunch of nonprofit organizations who also seem to ‘get it’ — they change up what they post from day to day.  Sure, there’s the advertising and organizational promotion, but there might be announcements about community events, reflections on issues, and an occasional splash of humor.  The nonprofits that I think do the best job on Facebook have a little joy and hope in their posts — so it’s not all ‘oh, God, look how bad things are.’

Facebook is just one little piece of social media.  Today, I was talking to a couple of nonprofit folks (Rochelle Dukes Fritsch from IMPACT and Janet Peshek from Cathedral Center, Inc.) who are putting it all together – Facebook, Twitter, Tweetdeck, LinkedIn – with all the enhancements in between.  How to do this and do it well is the topic of our next Planners and Grantwriters Roundtable – October 13th – at the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.  Sponsored by the Nonprofit Center of Milwaukee, the Roundtable brings people together to yak.  Yep, yak.  We organize a panel of experts and then we encourage Roundtablers to have at it.

On October 13th, the topic is social media….yeah, yeah, there’ve been a million social media workshops.  This one’s different. THIS ONE IS REALLY DIFFERENT.

We’re going to ask 100 QUESTIONS.  We’re going to have a dynamite panel and we’re going to bombard them with questions.

So help us out.  Give us your questions.  Use the comment section below and send off a couple of ideas.  What do you need to know to make social media really work for you and your organization?

ASK!

Luddites are Boring

I find Luddites irksome.  This, by the way, is a picture of a Luddite, one of those 19th century reactionaries who violently refused to adapt to new ways of manufacturing, new ways of thinking.  Stuck.  We’ve always done it this way, ergo we must continue same.  Yuck.

So when I run into someone who says something like “I barely got used to doing email.  I can’t handle Facebook,” I roll my eyes and look for the door.  Even worse to me is the phrase, usually uttered by people who wouldn’t know busy if it sat on their lap and kissed them on the cheek, “I don’t have time to be on Facebook.” 

Ok, I think.  You have time to be irrelevant?  Time to read the 10 Commandments on the original stone tablets?  Fine.  Be that way.  I can’t be bothered. 

Me.  I like it in the 21st century.  I love my desktop, laptop, Ipod Touch, Blackberry, email, website, blogs, and Facebook.  (I’ve got a Twitter account but posting to it seems to put me in the far reaches of self absorbed, so that’s been left to go dormant.)  I love hearing about what other people are doing and thinking; I love the access to people who I otherwise would never run into and would hesitate to call; and I love the challenge of finding something in my day/work/life worth posting.

My dad, who was a role model in a lot of weird and varied ways, went from using this 1930′s something Underwood typewriter to an IMac overnight.  Honest to God.  He was 89 years old when my mother died and I watched him type her obituary on this very typewriter.  A couple of months later, in a fit of something, I bought him an IMac.  Maybe I was surprised, not sure, but within 48 hours of delivery to his doorstep in Michigan, he fired me his first email.  Then ensued a lot of back and forth.  And this from a guy that I might talk to once a year on the phone.  He chatted, made wisecracks, complained about his printer, talked about the weather, and, this is really important and wouldn’t have happened otherwise, encouraged me during very hard times with my children.

My dad was able to recognize that times had changed, that how people communicated had changed.  That if he wanted to be in the loop, he needed to change it up.  Park the Underwood.  Try the new way.  Get in the game.  And not insist that the modernizing world double back and talk to him in Underwood language.  Facebook wasn’t around when my dad was alive.  I don’t know whether he’d had taken that step — but I’m not counting it out.  He was smart, my dad, smart enough to know that you go where the action is if you want to stay in the game.  There’s a message there for a lot of my business colleagues.  It’s not cute and quaint being a Luddite.  It actually takes you out of play — out of sight, out of mind.  Now you don’t want that, do you?