 Hello there. Welcome. Another episode of the non-profit show. Today our energy is high, and I'm so excited to have these two amazing people with us in the hot seat today. They're joining us from different parts of the nation, and you'll learn more about that here in just a bit, but we do have Dave and Sarah joining us, and they're here to talk to us about the collaborative leadership model. We're going to learn more about them, and hopefully I'll learn to say your last name, Dave, because I didn't even check that before we started. Basic. Okay, fantastic. Well, excited to have you both. Another episode of the non-profit show. We are thrilled to continue these conversations. Thanks to Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Non-profit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your non-profit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group. My nerd glasses are never far, and I also checked on Sarah, and hers are also right there. Looks like Dave might already have his on. We are ready for this conversation. 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I know you're shaking your head in disbelief, and I am too, because when Julia asked me to do this three years ago, we really thought it would be a two-week endeavor. And here we are going strong. So you can find all of our previous episodes, including this one today and just a few hours later on Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, as well as Vimeo. So if you have one of those smart TVs, you can just say, hey, pull up the non-profit show, and we're larger than life, depending on the size of your TV, as well as podcast form. So listen to the non-profit show wherever you stream your podcast. And you can hear this episode just a few hours after we finished today's conversation. So thank you for waiting so patiently and also saying yes to the invitation. I want to welcome Dave and Sarah. Again, they both join us from different parts of the nation, but they are with Inward Bound Mindfulness Education. You can find their website at ibme.com. Encourage you to check that out. But I'd love for you to share a little bit about who you are and a little bit about the organization. So I'll toss a coin and either of you can just pick up and run wherever you'd like. Awesome. Thank you so much, David. I'm going to start off if that's okay with you and introduce myself. I'm Sarah Wren. I am calling in from Massachusetts, and I have been a part of IBME staff team for five plus years. So at this point I'm the longest running staff member of our team of six. And I'll just say by way of introduction when I started, I was one of three full-time staff. So we've doubled in size and taken on this collaborative endeavor as we have grown. And I'll pass it to Dave. Fantastic. Sure. And I'm joining from Cleveland, Ohio. I work on fundraising and business strategy for IBME. I joined in 2020, so it was just before the pandemic, January 2020, where it was, oh, we have this nice onboarding process, and then we all know what happened in March. But just to share a little bit about what Inward Bound does, our primary work is working with teens. And we provide this rare opportunity of a summer camp retreat experience that's grounded in mindfulness. So we work with teens 15 to 19 years old all across the country. We have these retreats. And it's really connecting with a team that is looking for support, looking for exploring who they are in the world, finding some tools to help us navigate kind of the stress and anxiety that's inherent now in our everyday life, and providing this deep dive into this prolonged insight into who you are and sharing that with the community. Do you have that for adults? Because I'd like to attend. Yeah, we do have a teacher training program. So that's a year-long teacher training program that is for educators and youth-serving professionals. And we've also run adult retreats as well. And we find that the tools that we use with the kids are actually the same tools to use with the adults. So, yeah, it can be a really special experience. Well, thank you both. Really excited to have you here. I also want to give a shout out to my client, Mindfulness First. I know you're watching Kim and Sunny. So thank you so very much. But you brought this topic to my attention. And we're really talking about a non-hierarchical structure, what that might look like as we move forward. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with each of you today, because I think we have a lot to think about. So let's start off. And Sarah, start by sharing what informed this model, this collaboration model, what informed this to say, hey, that's what we like. That's what resonates with us. And we're going to adopt that. So take it away and share about that. I'm so happy to share about that. So the beginning of collaborative leadership at IBME predated me. I just want to give a shout out to the people who were there before me. The thought was, we know that a traditional nonprofit structure creates strain and burnout. There's a huge amount of burnout in nonprofit culture. And because we work in a mindfulness retreat environment, and that's what we're offering and delivering, there was this thought, like how can we actually make our work together, like administrative, logistical emails, feel more aligned with the work that we're doing, which is whole person centered, collaborative in nature, supportive of each other, and ideally not creating so much burnout that you don't want to do the work anymore. So kind of the discomfort of a traditional nonprofit structure is what started the IBME on this journey, and also a real willingness from the small staff to try and do things a little bit differently. So that's sort of what the catalyst was, and also all of the pitfalls of sort of a traditional, hierarchic structure where there isn't necessarily feedback flowing, there isn't necessarily decision making happening by the people who are enacting the decision, those sorts of things are really what drove us to start considering a different framework of how to work together. I love that. Dave, what would you add to this conversation? Yeah, I would add that it took time. It took a lot of time. Before we actually officially dissolved our executive director role, which was the start of 2020, there was three years of kind of incubation and exploring and actually developing a system of controls and flows that we were looking to embody. And so I'll just share my own personal place in it. That's when I joined. I was the first person hired under the new model where there was no executive director, and I was coming from an organization where I was the executive director. So just to share a little bit about that perspective is that it was, for me, I was trying to integrate collaborative work into my previous role and just finding that there was limits within the actual system and the structure. So I was actively not only looking, searching for this mission-oriented work, but also this particular way of organizational operating model. And so in that time, I'll just share that for me it was so refreshing because to have these cleared, which we'll get into as far as the avenues of decision making, but also that through feedback, I could still have a view that you might have an executive director role of kind of looking at the big picture, but I could offer that up in a way where it was in the realm of feedback. And I'll just say too, as far as non-hierarchical is appropriate, and I think it's important to know that there's still concentrations of power. So we're not, the way I always talk about it is we don't have one mountain peak, we have a whole range, a mountain range of folks that are in leadership. So I think that's something we learned early on, was that the idea of this was not a flat organization, but it's just that it wasn't just a single peaked organization. Thank you for that. I have, again, this is unscripted, so I have a very genuine question, but I want to, what I consider the elephant in the room, how do funders respond to this? Because funder applications, proposals, they say, who's your executive director? How do funders respond to this model? Yeah, so I can answer that just because I'm in the funding realm for us. I would say it's growing. We're seeing a lot now, if you kind of listen closely, you hear a lot of co-executive director models kind of popping up, and I think some of our funders that work with our organization and are connected to our mission are in a place of questioning current paradigm, what's new, what's going to serve the society of the future. So I would say overall, the receptivity has been positive with a lot of questions, and it's been on us to be really clear and transparently on our website, in our grant proposals to be very clear around what we're sharing today was what, you know, was the impetus for this model and getting a little bit into the weeds of how it works so that we can build that trust in that this is not only something that is interesting and innovative, but it's also a competitive advantage for us. So try to make that case. Yeah, thank you for that. And I think that takes us so perfectly into the collaborative leadership and the five core system. So what are these systems? And I love, I just have to recognize and give a call out, I love that mountain range, you know, and that really resonates with me. So it's not that there's not decision makers, but it's like, there's not one, there's not one that sits at the top. So thank you for that. Again, for a visual person, I really appreciate that mountain range. So what are the five core systems? So decision making is one of them. And I think that's a great place to start just to give you a little idea of how, how we do decision making. We are not operating on consensus. We actually aren't on aren't operating in that way, which I think a lot of times when people hear collaboration, they think of, you know, some sort of consensus model. We distribute decision making among the, the staff team, and some of our committees. So part of our model, in addition to our staff being collaborative, we also realized in this process that David was talking about that we had to restructure our board and how we thought about our community and our committees. Also, who do we want to be making decisions and leading? I think because the bulk of the decision making is held in the staff team, that's the easiest way to describe it. We operate our decision making on a, a scaled system. So everybody, every decision that has to be made at the organization has a one. The one is the decision maker. I am a programs person. So for example, I am the one decision maker on what sort of communication we share with our staff before a retreat. As the one, it's my job to make the decision. It's my responsibility to make the decision and it's my responsibility to seek input from those who are twos and threes on that decision. So as a staff team, we are regularly discussing who wants to be included in specific decisions and why. You know, if I'm making a decision that is going to impact marketing or in David's case, fundraising and resources, I really want to hear his input on the decision that I'm going to be making. So we structure things one through five in our decision making and we did, we didn't invent this system of decision making. Frederick Lillou's book, Reinventing Organizations, as well as Mickey Cash-Tan's work in Collaborative Leadership, Nonviolent Communication has really strongly informed our system. And I do think we get a little credit because we have really made it our own and it won't ever look the same at any other organization. So when any decision needs to be made, we follow the system of I'm the one making the decision. I want to seek input from those who are going to be affected, from those who might have relevant information, and from those who might be experts. Those that's sort of the way we're thinking about who you might want to ask for advice. And we try and structure things so that the person making the decision is the person carrying out the decision. This is super important to us because that is not traditionally how it happens if you have a boss who's telling you what to do and you're just executing that can really create feelings of not non-ownership and burnout and resentment and all of those things that we know can happen. David, do you have anything to add on decision making? I can move on to the next one. And I guess I'll frame these next three. You'll see that they all have flow on the end of it. So this is really when you look at our model of collaborative leadership, a way to also look is through the lens of a living system. So this is not something that we launched in 2020 and it's done. We are constantly living into this. So a big part of how we live into it is when I'm introducing the second one is feedback flow. And so feedback is absolutely critical in this model. It's how me and Sarah are talking to each other, how across the team, through board members, through committees, and we actually formalize this into a certain cadence depending on the amount of relation that you might have with a staff member. If there's someone that you're working intimately with on a day-to-day basis, you're probably going to want to have a feedback process with them once every two weeks, once a month. And basically, in that process, even if you don't have anything to talk about, even if there's nothing that's just a little bit, oh, there's a little tension here, there's still an invitation to have this connection and go through a process of feedback because things always emerge. But basically, we're looking for two things. One is this thing that you're doing, it's great. Keep doing more of it. Thank you. Sort of that realm of feedback. And then the other realm of feedback is, hey, this thing, this decision that was made or this flow, this recurring kind of whatever that's happening, it's having this impact. And here's something that I want you to be aware of that impact. And also, maybe there's a request of maybe there's another way to make that decision or so forth. So I'll kind of frame it here because I know what time, but feedback flow number two, Sarah. We can go to another flow and talk about info flow, which is really like internal communications would be another way to say it in non-profit language. How are we sharing all of the necessary things that are happening within our team to make collaboration possible? This is really important because in a regular nonprofit, an executive director is really holding all of that. They're meeting with staff members, they are the central gathering point, and then they're directing from there. In our case, we actually need to be communicating with each other in that way. If I'm making a connection that David needs to know about, we have to have that info flow. If there's feedback coming in that I'm hearing, we have to figure out the flows of information that need to get where they're going in order for people to be able to really well collaborate and do their jobs. I also just want to throw in there just to add to what David said. We often say that we're like building the plane while we're flying it. This is very much, we're kind of in like our second or third iteration of how we're working together in this way, but that's kind of the beauty of the system is that through feedback flows and information flows, we can make tweaks to the system or big changes. That's really important to us is that this is not static and we haven't actually figured every single thing out. We're just oriented towards how things can be more useful and collaborate better. That makes a lot of sense. Have we gone through the five because I think there's two more, right? Yep, there's two more. I'll take the next one quickly was another key flow is among our resources. Resources in a broad sense, but I think to zoom in on monetary resources, because we don't have that executive director role, our literacy around our budget and how what we're spending and what we're bringing in is important and really be distributed among the staff team. We have a flow of resources in terms of how we're aware of that. Our budgeting process looks a little different than probably other organizations, but you can ask any staff member and they're going to the amount of knowledge they have about the entirety of our financial model is high. Then the other unique thing I'll just share with this is salaries. Salaries, we actually have complete transparency around our salaries because we are creating the salaries ourselves. We have a six point criteria for how we each go through our own individual process of what our needs are, what the total budget availability are. We also include historical disadvantage and privilege in consideration for that. We look to have 150% maximum range between the highest and lowest salary within the organization. There's some pretty radical things in that, but we have found that process to be extremely enlightening for just our overall holding and also our own relationships with each other to have that sense of transparency and vulnerability in terms of money, which can be always taboo around. That is very vulnerable and I applaud you for that. I subscribe to transparency, financial transparency. In fact, I'm asked often to share with my network when there's open positions for different organizations across the nation. I finally said only if you have the high-ring range. That's the only way for many reasons, but I appreciate that. We have one more, right? One more of the collaborative. Maybe the most fun of them all, conflict engagement is the fifth system, which is a system where we are trying to really be real with each other and work with each other in a way that is meaningful and impactful. Sometimes a feedback flow, sometimes something is not going to completely be copacetic. That's when we can engage a process of discerning how we can rebuild trust and continue to work together or how can we mutually agree? How can we get to some sort of agreement about working together in the future? We're hoping with a conflict engagement system that we're being really clear about power because that's where conflict in organizations happens or doesn't happen, rather, is when a person in power says this is how it's going to be and the person with less power has to just kind of absorb all of that. We're trying to do things differently to really bring more resources to when there is disagreement or conflict. Who can recap those five? I want to make sure that we've captured them. Decision-making, I know it's number one. Then we've got three flows, right? Yes, resource flow, information flow and feedback flow. The fifth one was the conflict engagement. Just to frame it, when those three flows break down or there's a lack of clarity around decisions being made, that's when conflict arises. Conflict, that can be a tough word to kind of hold. It can be very subtle tension. Some of that can be already tended to in a feedback flow. We're welcoming that. We see conflict as good news because it's brought into the open and we have the resources to move through it and reach deeper understanding. This is an assumption, but I feel like probably some of your core values are transparency and vulnerability. I am assuming you have to lean into that to really make this work. Yeah, you sure do. It's not easy. It's kind of an uphill, at least for me. I'll speak for myself. In terms of feedback and conflict engagement specifically, it's really relearning how to engage in a work setting where there isn't this distinction between the personal and the professional. We bring our whole authentic selves with us. It is a practice of leaning in and vulnerability. It's not always easy, especially when we're socialized to internalize and not going to worry about it. I'm going to get the work done. We actually believe that all of this collaboration is in service to better work together. It actually creates a stronger product. This is when Brene Brown steps in and talks about vulnerability. If anyone has a connection to her, of course, we'd love to have her. Let's talk about the model growth. Can this model grow as I be me grows? Is that something that you've considered? Yeah, it is. I don't know if I feel like a really strong, yes, we can grow to be 100 staff and have this exact model. I feel like certainly the way of working in collaboration without one person, the executive director in charge, is scalable. There are lots of examples in the two frameworks that I mentioned, reinventing organizations of huge collaborative organizations who have done distributed non-hierarchic decision making. I think we're up on a challenge. We will be soon is that we'll be hiring a seventh staff member and considering how this staff member in a role that is more support-oriented and less large-scale decision-making oriented, how we use that in our model. Currently, as David was saying, with the peaks, we all the sixth staff members have a scope of decision-making. Scaling will look a little different. And has this been brought into that trauma-informed care lens? Is that a lens of perspective? Yeah, I would say in the collaborative leadership model, it's not something we have explicitly kind of teased out. It's certainly trauma-informed teaching is part of our programs, that's core to our programs. But I think what we're building in terms of the culture and the connection does support a process of tenderly holding the trauma we all have. So having a space where it might come out in a way that is supportive and that maybe there's some healing involved with it. And other times where we're not as skillful. And I think for me, the question of can this grow, I think as long as we continue to commit to the core of the model, it will grow. It has grown with us. It's just to predict where it grows into. That's actually not how this actually goes. The point is responsiveness. The point is being in relationship. And so the more we can be as a whole system, have all those flows, then we learn and we have the mechanisms to evolve it. So I do think it can grow. And I'll say this is not for everybody. This is something that we felt has worked for us. And it can take different shapes in other organizations as well. I want to talk to both of you so much longer. I really do. It's been a wonderful conversation. Again, this was brought to me from one of my clients who might just adore mindfulness first here in the Greater Phoenix area. This is a structure of consideration. I've heard it from other organizations and clients of mine. So thank you so very much for sharing transparently and vulnerably, both of you, Sarah and Dave, for coming on, representing inward bound mindfulness education. Please check them out. I love what you do. Again, I would love to participate in these camps as an adult myself, because age is only a number when it comes to being a kid. So I'm a big kid at heart. But ibme.com is the website here. Thank you so very much again for your time, your expertise. Julie and I are so very honored to have you here again. Thank you for saying yes. And I know we're here sitting in Q4, busy season. All of us are probably stressed even if we do the work to stay away from stress. I think it still finds those little cracks and it enters our life some way. But again, I am so deeply grateful to each of you for joining me today, your entire team for allowing you this time as well. I also want to honor our presenting sponsors, they are fantastic partners of ours. So huge shout out of gratitude to our friends over at Blimmering American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy with the National University, Be Generous, Your Part-Time Controller, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Thought Leader, and the Nonprofit Nerd. Now is a great time to check out these companies because I wanted to make sure that you heard what Sarah and Dave had to offer today. Again, please share this episode with your board, with your volunteers, with your committee members, with your staff. Consider this structure. There's so much to learn in this brief 30 minutes. So again, thank you both so very much. Thank you so much for having us. Pleasure. Thank you. Absolutely. Well, for those of you that have joined us live or perhaps tuning in to a recording, thank you as well. We end every episode with this beautiful mantra. We ask you to please stay well, so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow for our Freyay episode.