 good afternoon good evening depending on where you're coming to us from this is another episode of the nonprofit show and we have on a really cool guest because he looks so fabulous and dapper number one but Anthony Adix Jr. is going to be talking to us today about developing courageous leaders you know we talk a lot about leadership on the nonprofit show we talk about it throughout our sector but a courageous leader wow this is a special time to really be thinking about this so Anthony we are delighted you are here in case we haven't met before I'm Julia Patrick CEO of the American nonprofit Academy Jared R. Ransom the nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven group is off this week again we have these amazing amazing Anthony I want to call on courageous sponsors because you know they don't dictate what we talk about they have no editorial control nor I mean they we ask for input of course but I mean so they're courageous leaders in in turning over their names and their logos and their branding to these conversations they include Bloomerang American nonprofit Academy your part-time controller nonprofit thought leader fundraising academy at National University staffing boutique nonprofit nerd and nonprofit tech talk and what's really cool about these folks is that most of them have been with us for more than 900 episodes and you can find us on our streaming broadcast platforms podcast platforms and also Anthony I like to call it our sexy new app so you can download that QR code and then we'll connect with you every day when the new shows are managed okay Anthony a dicks junior I love that you're here I love that we're gonna have this conversation I have to admit I've watched some of your videos on your website and you're like super engaging super empowering and you make me believe that I can do this and that's a skill and so let's back up and ask you to kind of share with us what 180 management group does and how you impact the nonprofit sector well first and foremost let me first say thank you so very much for the opportunity to share on a subject that I love there's nothing more than I love well maybe one more maybe a two more things that I love more than leadership and that's leaders and my wife so thank you so very much for having me on this this afternoon or whatever time you are in the viewing audience to share about courageous leadership I am Anthony a dicks junior and I'm the senior leadership consultant at 180 management group which is a boutique management consulting firm that transforms nonprofits in their operational culture and we do that through three areas people processes and planning and so we really love to come alongside nonprofit organizations so that we can help them overcome their unique challenges and get back to doing what they love and that is transforming the world and again I'm just elated to be here today to have this opportunity to converse with you Julia thank you for having me no this is really cool now we I have to fess up you know we had I don't want to call her your better half but we had the lovely Mariam better definitely better definitely better we had Mariam on months ago and she was transfixing we were just like wow she was so riveting and again gave us some ideas and perspectives that we don't often hear because so often as you know Anthony we're so like you know nose to the grindstone dealing on our mission and we just don't look up and we don't take a deep breath and kind of think about what we're actually doing and maybe more how we're doing it so let's talk about this this word which I find fascinating you know we we always say leaders achieve missions but you snuck in this word courageous yes yes what does that mean courageous leaders and in my leadership framework it's built on the idea of heroic leadership now heroic leadership as it's studied in academia has its challenges and I nuance the the term and concept a little bit differently because in academia they talk about heroic leadership being those leaders who wear a cape and they save and they make decisions unilaterally for me a heroic leader is someone who inspires people to aspire to do things and be things greater than themselves and they do that via community and there's certain characteristics of a heroic leader in ancient storytelling heroes usually possessed of virtue that the author of the story wanted the culture to emulate and begin to reproduce within the body politic and in Greek mythology many of those virtues cardinal virtues one was temperance which is self-control prudence which is wisdom justice and then ultimately courage and they say that courage is the virtue upon which all other virtues hinge so a courageous leader is is necessary to achieve mission because the mission that our nonprofit organizations are engaged in create and have so much meaning and anytime you're engaged in meaningful work anytime you're trying to accomplish something that is going to bring meaningful transformation and change to a community to a person to an individual it's risky business and you can't get involved in risky business if you don't have courage so nonprofit leaders have to inherently be courageous because of the nature of the work they do it takes a courageous leader to achieve mission and so that's what I mean by that and that courage is a virtue it is a leadership superpower really it really it is and in order to achieve mission you got to have that leadership superpower so that you can really get the work done and continue to do it when it gets tumultuous and tough well I you know this is this is really profound that you would come on and say this right now because I feel like we have had so much fear so much fear for the last now starting very shortly four years and if you think about the pandemic the global health pandemic pandemic civil unrest economic uncertainty poor discourse you know how how poor our civil behavior has been fear I have to say and I hate saying oh I can't stand saying this fear has kind of ruled the day yes yes in many ways in many ways it has if people have you know you'll say well I don't want to get in trouble by saying this or you know there's a fearful approach to just how we govern ourselves and so this is a heavy a heavy lift for a lot of folks yeah talk to us about this this piece of a formulaic framework I love that you gave us an overarching way to look at leadership and virtue I think is a really cool way to look at this can we turn this into a formula can we be consistent with this sure yeah without without a doubt you can't courage does often operate on a continuum but again it's necessary in a day and age where the earth the planet and the people in it are experiencing a degree of connectedness that we haven't had before the worldwide web so because of the worldwide web we are digitally connected and the global market is a real thing like you no one is doing business as locally as they were 30 years ago yeah what happens because of that is our connectedness creates a context where disruption can affect people globally even though the disruption started somewhere locally and that's what we saw with the global pandemic it started in a village but it affected the entire planet and when those things occur it creates a feeling of scarcity there's not enough resources or not enough time or not enough people there's not enough to go around and in a context with the where there is a lot of scarcity you need courageous leaders you got to meet scarcity not with abundance you meet scarcity with courage and in order to gain that courage need a few things one you need curiosity this is the formula you need curiosity competence and confidence curiosity competence confidence and lastly community wow okay i've just like i've just come to your church because i love how you phrase this each one of those aspects is different but they work in harmony a magical degree if you don't have one you know i can see what you're saying you know that the web of pulling meals okay say that again to you because that that might be the coolest thing i've heard so far this year if you want to develop courageous leaders what courageous leaders need in order to develop and events and embody that courage they need curiosity you have to have a seeker a researcher you there's got to be a desire to not just know what you know but to know what you don't know to go out there and and learn and in many instances we're operating at an operational rhythm where we feel like we don't have time enough to learn we've got time enough to act but not time enough to learn but if you're going to be courageous instead of reckless or fearful yeah you gotta you gotta have some courage you gotta have some curiosity to kind of really give you the research and information necessary to make sound decisions make great strategies motivate people and lead them into the future you also got to be competent you got to be competent not i'm i'm getting ready to say something that i don't like saying i don't want to get in trouble here but we are living in a day and age where we are sacrificing leadership on the altar of charisma so as long as you're charismatic you don't have to necessarily be competent that doesn't work in the nonprofit space if you're going to be a leader you need to be charismatic that's fine you can be charismatic but you need to be competent so you got to be trained then you got to have what is one of the things that's just slippery is is is a premium but it's not a lot of it it's not like it's a lot like time and money it's confidence yeah courageous leaders have to have confidence and they may not have the same amount of confidence all the time but if they spend enough time being curious in order to gain and bolster and enhance competence their curiosity plus their competence will help them to feel confident say i i know that we're operating in a space where we're moving into an unknown but we know enough about the unknown so to speak and some of the variables within it to where i have the courage and the confidence to say i think we can move i think we can move forward lastly and this is one of the challenges i think particularly of a 21st century nonprofit leader is community i've had the opportunity to coach some of the world's greatest in my mind some of the world's greatest nonprofit leaders and many of them wrestle with loneliness yes and definitely wrestle with loneliness yes we talk about teams a lot in our organizations but for how we are socializing in this day and age we may want to begin using the word community in regards to the people in which we work with because a courageous leader requires the support of the team to take the risk so that they feel comfortable failing yeah without dire consequences courageous leader needs an atmosphere where they have the psychological safety to say i i i'm sure i'm confident yes but i am not a hundred percent sure that it's going to work and if it fails i need to be able to fall back not on my competence but i need to fall back on my community so that i can navigate and learn from the failure without feeling like a failure so that that community piece is critical critical for courageous leaders because even though they are facing challenges that no one else has a responsibility to plan strategically to navigate they need a community of support so that they don't feel alienated while they're trying to achieve mission you know i haven't really heard anyone talk about that the way you just phrased it was beautifully spoken and and beautifully laid out because i think a lot of times that we are so afraid again going back to that concept of fear a failure and saying you know to me failure is only bad if you didn't learn something exactly you know so you got it but i can i love this concept of community i feel like this is maybe one of those underpinnings of why so many people are searching for mentors and not just young people i think that's what's fascinating it's not just young people exactly it is i i think anthony to to maybe draw you know a line to that it is that community and fascinating concept i'm gonna really i mean you've given me a lot to think of but think about but this is one of them uh that i'm gonna look around in my own uh cohort if you will and and really see if that's it's important working one of the things that you talk about is overcoming barriers to courageous execution and my question for you is get your pictures your catchers mitt because this is a curveball okay is this internal or is this external is this like how we view ourselves our barriers like self-imposed yes oh they are okay or versus like downward pressure from community society our sector yes it is self-imposed okay and this requires that the the heroic leader to see themselves and the world and and with a particular paradigm and perspective okay in in story theory you have a hero and this is some some of the story theory from of course uh joseph cambell or chris vogler or christopher booker or even a donald miller you got a hero this is what donald miller says in his book hero on the mission hero a victim of villain and a guide and they go under different names depending upon what story theorists you're reading the hero's nemesis the hero's nemesis is is the villain and the obstacle they must overcome right but those two things kind of necessitate a heroic act they aren't barriers to heroic action they are the reason why the hero needs to act right so your obstacle is not a barrier to your action is the reason why you need to act right the barrier is what keeps you from acting yeah and what keeps many courageous leaders or potentially courageous leaders and heroic leaders from acting is feeling like they're inadequate yep yep feeling like they are imposters i was just gonna say imposter syndrome that's exactly exactly which is the reason why you need the mechanisms of curiosity and competence have you you probably uh noticed this in in your time like looking at movies and stuff like that you may see a maybe it's a scary movie and you're sitting in the theater looking at the television screen and you're saying to yourself why are these people walking in there like you hear a noise why are you walking towards right that's the heroic curiosity necessary for courageous action so the person who's curious enough to begin to investigate where that sound is coming from let's investigate why we haven't been able to increase endowment or we haven't been able to get as much from our donors as we have in the past let's investigate how it is we can move into this new space now that the legislation has changed or the mood of the body politic has changed in regards to how we were funded or how we were even going to give these services now the government used to factor out these services to us as a nonprofit and now they're saying they want to bring those things back into health and human service so how do we navigate this with the person who has that curiosity is the one that's got the seed of courageous leadership and they need to give a be given the opportunity and the competence necessary to act because that's what helps to overcome the barrier of the feeling of inadequacy I don't know enough I don't have enough or the feeling like an imposter I'm in the wrong place somebody else would be better at this if you feel yourself saying that and you're watching this I want to tell you you're the best person for the job you know and so thank you for saying that to our viewers and to our listeners I would love this is always kind of one of my favorite lenses to look through because you know I'm a white woman of privilege over the age of 60 I'm wondering does this have like a gender lens like do women suffer more from this than men when I look out there I think if you're a white male it's you know you'll be like yeah I can do that where a white woman would be like well I need more education or even though those two people might be on the same level on on paper on paper just like everything lined up same education same region same age same economic situation but that gender piece is a little different and do you see that or is that just something that we get caught up in I think you identified something that is so necessary for us to kind of unpack and unfold because how you respond to inadequacy has a lot to do with the heroes you've seen overcome it interesting yeah okay so if I don't have a lot of heroes who show the way of how they've dealt with their inadequacy I'm inadequacy may affect me to a different degree not that one gender has it more than others we all may wrestle with it but our response to it can be hampered by who we've seen celebrated as courageous leaders if we don't celebrate enough women in leadership then young women in leadership may not respond appropriately when they feel those feelings of inadequacy is basically if I've seen you do it then I know it can be done and when the aggregate the aggregate leadership community only sees one type of leader overcoming it says to them subconsciously well then obviously somebody who looks like me dresses like me is my age we don't have what it takes to overcome because all of the people who've overcome it look this way they dress this way they talk this way they're in this particular age bracket I don't have what it takes and so I think you're on to something about how gender differences respond to feelings of inadequacy differently which is one of the reasons why we need to be celebrating a more diverse group of heroic leaders there's enough room in the sky for every star to shine there's enough room on the stage for more than one hero yeah I love that you said that and we need to be cultivating that I mean for more reasons than just this conversation but you know we have an aging population we have a huge demographic of leadership that's retiring yeah that's like aging out of leadership you know and we so so I feel like this is the right time the right and the right time to start having these conversations so that we can bubble up these these next gen leaders as opposed to complaining about them which I feel like a lot of people my age you know complain about the next gen leadership which is dreadful I mean it's a drug that's that's a topic for another day let me you know I could talk to you for I'm telling you through the holidays because I'm riveted by so much of what you've said but I want you if you can to drill down to the number one benefit of having created courageous leadership that's really that's everything you said it's like there's too much to choose from that's easy the number one benefit of courageous leadership is this contagious not what I thought you would say okay it's contagious when you see someone else being courageous and and they do it and do it well which they do it it brings something out of you it brings something up in me there's a wonderful poem by Edgar a guest called somebody said that it couldn't be done somebody said that it couldn't be done but he would have trucker replied that maybe it couldn't but he would be one who wouldn't say so till he tried that that poem and the reading the rehearsing of that story of somebody doing something that was never done before is is told in order to help somebody else do what they've never done before and courageous leadership does that it gives someone an opportunity to inspire someone to aspire to do something they've never done before and when you execute with courage in an organization it should be celebrated because you get what you celebrate what you what you promote is what you permit you get what you celebrate when you celebrate that type of courageous leadership it incentivizes others to do the same so the number one benefit of one courageous leader in an organization executing courageously is that it becomes a contagion within the entire organization and you can have an organization field with courageous leaders wow you know that might be the month for me that might be the biggest lesson of this conversation um i'm going to go back and watch this this episode because i've i've heard you say so many amazing things that i think sometimes we know or we feel but maybe maybe we can't articulate it or we can't put it in you know you use that word framework and i love that i think that's really powerful and you know i love what you said about i'm going to think about this today anthony um i love what you said about leadership can be contagious because i think that a lot of leaders to your point feel like they're by themselves they're at the top of a pyramid and they don't think about that they think about am i getting the job done yep yep yep versus are we nurturing and cultivating more of this this approach because we work in fear yeah and and working in fear inoculates a lot of a lot of your peripheral vision right we talk about leadership and vision many of the times that vision creates tunnel vision when you need your peripheral vision to be 2020 as well so that you can continue to bring others alongside of you because when you're leading by yourself you're not leading you're just taking a walk and so focusing focusing on opportunities to again create communities that have courageous leaders in them is important for us to navigate some of the nuances that the future promises to challenge us with and and we've got models we just got to continue to provide them with the training to be competent the space to be curious right the affirmation to be confident and the community to feel safe yeah to feel safe we can do those things then the sky's the limit for what we can accomplish well you have been a magical magical guest and i think um wow i literally i could just keep keep this conversation going um really really a wonderful and uplifting way to look at this um issue of leadership and why we get discouraged and i think anthony you know this is a conversation to be had because we're burning out our leaders we're flying them they deal with such tough tough things and so how do you insulate yourself from the horror and the trauma that you might be engaged in and lead at the same time find that compassion and confidence incompetence like you said to to navigate out super important this is amazing anthony a dicks junior senior leadership consultant 180 management group check out 180 management group dot com their website's beautifully done beautifully done thank you oh yeah it's it's just lovely um but it has some great information you can actually watch um content from some of the trainers to learn about how they work with their their clients and how they work with coaching and process um it's it's riveting stuff and i think um in today's world anthony we need to be stepping back and saying how do we not just fight the fires but we do fire management prevention right like right how do we kind of say okay wait i'm not just going to be responding to all the disasters i've got to be more of a leader and be thoughtful about this and i feel that's kind of like your your vibe when you go through that site so really cool i so so enjoyed this thank you oh yeah pardon me i'm super inspired myself and i think anthony before i let you go you know this is the time of year where a lot of leaders they're fatigued and they're frightened because they're not going to make their numbers or they're worried about next year you know demand goes up around the holidays whatever things are going at you right and so this was a perfect time to hear this message so thank you for coming on to the non-profit show again i'm julia patrick c of the american non-profit academy jared ransom uh ceo of the raven group also known as the non-profit nerd i'm gonna tell a little secret she's on her honeymoon um i don't know if we're supposed to say that but she's on her honeymoon she got married last year and wasn't able to take time off but so we're excited about that hey um everybody again we want to thank our sponsors they include bloomarang american non-profit academy your part-time controller non-profit thought leader fundraising academy at national university staffing boutique non-profit nerd and non-profit tech talk these are the folks that join us day in and day out so we can have magical guests on like we've had with anthony dicks jr on today okay you have so charged me up today i've got a meeting i gotta jump on to and i'm gonna look at this meeting that i'm going into next with a new lens thank you amazing thank you for having it's been lovely hey everybody as we leave every episode of the non-profit show we like to end with this message and goodness sakes it means something different every time i say it which is so weird but i've been saying this line now for almost four years and the message is to stay well so you can do well thank you so much anthony happy holidays to you my friend