My greatest moments of learning occurred when someone who was my senior took me aside and told me what I was doing wrong.
“You need to learn how to understate your arguments,” a college professor once advised. “You come across like a jerk, and it turns people off.”
“Why are you critiquing what other people are doing?” an elder at an interfaith event told me. “You’ve got your own vision. You should build that.”
“Your organization is not making the impact it could because you spend more time giving high-profile speeches than designing high-impact strategies,” an older consultant friend once said.
My life is full of countless such incidents — each essential to my growth as a leader, and all of them supremely uncomfortable when they occurred.
I fear my kids, ages 13 and 16, will not have such life-changing opportunities, particularly if they go into social-sector work.
Why? Well, let me put it this way. Do you give unvarnished advice to students or interns or junior staff the way you might have 10 or 20 years ago — the way your mentors gave you advice?
Why would you if providing even standard feedback to an employee might lead to a grievance claim that triggers a human-resources investigation? Why risk offering guidance if you could be publicly branded as a racist and a sexist for advice as pedestrian as how to dress professionally?
I increasingly believe that mentoring is the great unspoken casualty of the nonprofit upheaval era, in which relatively new employees feel it’s their right to question virtually every aspect of what their employers do and how they do it.
Here’s a fairly typical story.
I have a friend, a senior editor at a nonprofit publishing house, who once took great pride in both listening to the views of her editorial assistants and in helping them learn the craft of editing books. But after the millionth time a staff meeting turned into a call-out session over which authors had the right to write on which subjects, or on the injustice of senior staff receiving higher salaries than newly hired employees, my editor friend stopped trying to mentor her junior staff and simply assigned them tasks.
I related this story to another friend who runs a nonprofit, and his response surprised me. Instead of questioning why she stopped mentoring her assistants, he wondered what took her so long. “Why did she wait until the millionth revolutionary staff meeting to come to that conclusion?”
He had made his own decision on the matter several years earlier, and it was even more stark: He barely talked to his junior staff at all.
Unsurprisingly, most junior staff haven’t noticed. How could they? By definition, the kind of mentoring conversations I’m talking about focus on what young people don’t know about the world or don’t see about themselves. Unless someone takes the trouble to point it out, they don’t know what they don’t know.
Employee complaints have undoubtedly grown in other fields. One business consultant writing in Forbes recently suggested that the Great Grievance may be replacing the Great Resignation. But I think the problem is especially bad in the nonprofit world.
For proof, start by reading (or rereading) Ryan Grim’s influential piece in the Intercept — “The Elephant in the Zoom.” The article focuses on how junior staff upheavals have led to “wrenching and debilitating turmoil” so severe that “the progressive advocacy space across the board has, more or less, ceased to function.”
Withholding Advice
But another important thread runs throughout the article, one that has received far less attention: It is increasingly rare for organizational leaders to give direct advice to junior staff.
Consider this anonymous quote from a nonprofit executive director interviewed by Grim: “A lot of the staff that work for me, they expect the organization to be all the things: a movement, OK; get out the vote, OK; healing, OK; take care of you when you’re sick, OK. It’s all the things. Can you get your love and healing at home, please? But I can’t say that: They would crucify me.”
It’s not hard to see how this statement, slightly adapted, might serve as sound advice from a seasoned nonprofit leader to a younger staff member. That advice might go something like this:
After 20 years of working in progressive institutions, I’ve learned a handful of things that I’d like to pass on to you.
One, good organizations choose specific areas of focus and try to make a difference on that defined set of issues over a long period of time. If you give in to the temptation of being all things to all people, you wind up not doing anything well for anyone.
Two, for both your personal well-being and your ability to make a powerful impact over the long term, you need to establish a semblance of work-life balance. Don’t expect to get all your fulfillment from your workplace, however much you’re committed to the mission.
But instead of pulling junior staff aside and having these kinds of conversations, the executive director interviewed by Grim fed anonymous quotes to a journalist writing an exposé on meltdowns within nonprofit organizations.
Why is that? The answer is right there in the last line of the quote: “But I can’t say that: They would crucify me.”
Giving someone personal, painful-to-hear advice is always challenging. And certainly such feedback can at times stray into personal attacks or traffic in stereotypes and bias. But the nonprofit sector is on a problematic course if senior professionals can’t share their wisdom and experience for fear of being charged with creating a hostile environment and getting reported to HR — or worse.
My concern is not with people like my editor friend who now simply assigns tasks to her editorial assistants instead of mentoring them so they can become better editors themselves. She’s a little sad about doing less mentoring, but she’s got meaningful work and lots of hobbies. She’ll get over it.
My concern is for the editorial assistants who have lost someone who was willing to guide them in their careers. And for the authors, who will have fewer good editors to nurture their talents. And for the nonprofit publishing houses that will, down the line, have fewer top-notch editors, excellent authors, and high-quality books. And for the libraries. And for the readers.
This is a crisis for the nonprofit world. At a time of mounting societal challenges, we are effectively giving up on the potential of our future leaders. What’s the solution? I’m not sure. But it’s time to start the conversation.
