 We're really excited that you're here joining us today. It's no secret. The nonprofit sector is changing. Leadership is changing. And we have two gentlemen here today. And this is gonna throw me for a loop because you're both named John. We have John Tisa, Director of Client Services of JMT Consulting. And Dr. John Davidoff, Founder and Chief Mission Officer of Davidoff Mission Driven Business Strategy. Both of these gentlemen are gonna have a really robust conversation with us about developing nonprofit professionals. And it's really investing in future leadership. And so we are super excited to have them here. Again, we've been rolling out a new cohort of co-hosts for the nonprofit show. And you're gonna be even meeting more of them over the next couple of weeks and we're really, really excited to have some new national and different perspectives joining us daily. We also have amazing gratitude for our corporate sponsors and they include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Staffing Boutique, Your Part-Time Controller, 180 Management Group, Fundraising Academy at National University, JMT Consulting, Nonprofit Tech Talk, and Nonprofit Thought Leader. John Tisa, you're joining us, Director of Client Services, JMT Consulting. Talk to me a little bit about what JMT does and how you've come to be interested in the leadership piece of this. Well, thank you very much. So JMT is a software and consulting services firm that is focused exclusively on nonprofit organizations and is supporting and assisting them with any of their back office needs or system or program needs, staff development, accounting services, et cetera. We do a lot, try to be a one-stop shop for everybody that works at any nonprofit organization. And my initial introduction to leadership started off in the, we'll say the classic perspective of it being around title and role and authority. And then I actually had met Dr. John here when he came and presented for my whole company at our annual client conference, Innovate. And just to keep it short, he was himself in a way that allowed me to challenge my assumptions or beliefs about leadership. And we initiated a relationship and he has for upwards of six years now personally supported and nurtured my continued development and growth. Okay, Dr. John Davidoff, you know, this is a unique situation that you're in because a lot of times, well, I can think maybe a half a dozen times, somebody's come on and been able to witness about a guest and how they've impacted them. So talk to us about what you do because this is pretty powerful. Well, thanks and thanks for having me on the show. So I'm the founder and chief mission driver at Davidoff Strategy. And what our firm does is help nonprofit organizations become authentically mission-driven. And my partners and I have spent, we're in our 20th year. So we've spent 20 years researching both academic theory and concepts, but real life experience is what actually doesn't mean to be authentically mission-driven as a nonprofit organization. And what we've found out is it means having a comprehensive strategic plan, which is a plan that has critical thinking, has identified what is the situation this plan is responding to, has paradigm shifts built into a whole bunch of things you don't find in the normal strategic plan. Authentic mission-driven organizations also have continuous leadership development as a value. So they value that everyone is learning and growing from the CEO executive director throughout the organization. And then the third one, and I think I'm gonna get a smile from you on this, is they strive to have a drama-free higher functioning culture. Thank you. That should be number one, Dr. John. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for saying that. I think a lot of folks believe that or talk about it, but they don't actually embed that in their systems. And so thank you, thank you, thank you for bringing that up because let's face it, for most of us, we are working in trauma. We are working in tough drama-laden environments. And so it's easy to absorb that and keep that going. Let's drill down a little bit and talk about the multiple areas of an effective nonprofit leader. It seems to me a lot of times we think, oh, if somebody is coming from arts and culture, they gotta stay in arts and culture. They can't navigate to, let's say, human services or how do both of you gentlemen see that in relationship to being effective? John, Tisa, let's start with you. Sure. Well, I think that there's a measure of effectiveness in any role at any organization that is gonna relate to, we'll say the hard skills, but there's also a personal role of effectiveness in any function that any of us holds at any job that are about us as individuals and not about the role that we're working within. And it's those traits and characteristics that make an effective leader able to operate successfully in any role anywhere, regardless of what they may have prior experience with. Dr. John, that's an interesting thing because that doesn't for some wackadoo reason seem to be the prevailing thought, right? No, and I'm gonna make it worse because I'm build on what John Tisa was saying because another way of what John's saying is we believe that the more we can bring an individual out to really appreciate all their skills, all their values, their sense of meaning, their sense of purpose, their emotional expression, their deepest desires that when all of that comes to work every day, we get more Julia, we get more John Tisa, we get more me, we get more of everyone. And when we have more of that in play, a lot of cool things happen. Now we're off script. Now we're just in the moment seeing what happens out of the ways we are with each other. Yeah, I think I can see that. And I don't know, I would ask you as well. It almost seems like that's a new behavior. Like we weren't really working in that direction. We were kind of like leave your stuff at home. Who you are, what you do, what your family environment, what your community is, what your beliefs are, beliefs are show up and do the job. It seems to me like this is a whole new ecosystem of how we behave and dare I say lead. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. And some cultures embrace it and others don't. And we're also at the time of political challenges, divisive ways as a nation, as a world. And a lot of our work is helping people become self-aware, but also other aware because how you approach life and our organization together and how I do are probably very different. And so we need to be self-aware to know how we're approaching it and what kind of, what are the rules or the beliefs we have about how things should be done. But then I also need to find out how are you coming from that? Cause until we even have that exchange, we have two different cultures. We have my culture and we have your culture. It looks like we're one culture, but we're really not. And now I translate that out across an entire team at an organization. Right, right. And I have never heard that term other aware. I love it. I mean, that paints a picture that is amazing. I'm gonna have to really think about that because I think that's a brilliant way to rethinking how we work. The other thing I wanna ask both of you gentlemen about is how do we identify and nurture leadership? I think a lot of times this can be gender biased in that women tend to be, wait to be asked and we will hear tap on the shoulder or you were tapped on the shoulder versus males a lot of time will be like, I wanna lead, call me up, put me in the game coach kind of mentality. And I'm wondering what you see there or if that's just old school thinking. Dr. John, I'll throw this to you first. Well, this is about getting to know people. And I do a lot of interviewing for my clients for new hires because I am trained to find out things about people that my clients are not trained in. And they're looking really for skill sets for their organizations and they're doing the right thing. I'm looking for something different. I'm looking for who is this person? Where are they developmentally as a leader? And what are the themes of their development that they're gonna bring to the new job if they get hired? And so that all of that's on the table between an employer and an employee going into it. So it's not something we discover about each other 90 days into the relationship. Yeah, that would be problematic. John, Tisa, what does this look like within your own organization? And how do you see this functioning at JMT Consulting? Because this is a real thing that's probably going on every day, right? Yes, yes. And in fact, it's beyond every day, Julia. It's every moment with everybody. We mentioned before that leadership classically is considered a function of your title or your role or some authority that you're granted. And what John and I work on and support others to see is that leadership is purely the ability to influence somebody and that every single person has the ability to be an influence on someone else. We are all leading all the time. And it's an entire mindset shift. For example, helping the members of my team who work with our clients directly see how they can lead other groups within JMT even though they don't have any prescribed authority over them has been an entire mentality shift that has allowed that one team to hold others to raise their game, so to speak. Everyone is a leader and it's about how are we bringing ourselves fully into our work every day to have that influence. So I've got to ask this question. How do you communicate that? Because for some people, this is gonna be the first time they've ever heard that, right? Because they're like, I'm not C-suite, how would I, I'm just a worker bee, how can I do that? How do you, you gotta be telling the story over and over again. This isn't like a one and done thing, right? Correct, that is absolutely correct. For all of us rewiring our internal selves, there's a concept of neuroplasticity, rewiring ourselves takes a lot of time. And now Dr. John could go on about this, how for my own growth journey, accepting and being okay with the time it takes to grow and change has been part of my own journey. But my continuous support and reminders for the team over time has helped them really solidify and internalize that for example, when I tell them, I'm gonna support you if you hold someone else to a higher standard, that gives them the security to take that risk. And it's all about taking risks. Wow, Dr. John is a leader. Sometimes I would, if I thought my team was like, we're gonna take a risk, I'd be like, whoa, whoa, wait. It can be like a little scary, right? Absolutely, but the risk taking, and I always like to say, getting out of bed is the first risk we take every day, right? And there are people who don't get out of bed, that's real. But then, and I'm constantly all day long, like, good job, you stood up, good job, you got dressed, good job, you made your to-do list. I'm just affirming every little thing I did that seems like it should be procedural and all that, but sometimes these little things are like moving me closer and closer to the next thing. The client meeting, the client presentation, the research analysis, the work that we each need to do that can be kind of terrifying. And so it's taking these risks and being kind to ourselves in the risk taking. A big theme of my research that keeps people from actually developing more of themselves as leaders is this whole sense of being able to appreciate myself, self appreciation. And learning, there's a lot, you hear a lot about self compassion, that's self love. Those are big words. And I was taught, like, let's just break it down into the very smallest things we're doing moment by moment and let's appreciate those things. You know, that's a great word because I think appreciation is scalable, where the other words seem to be a little bit more, you know, you're 100% or you're 0%. And so that appreciation can mean a lot of different things. So I like, I'm gonna use that word, I appreciate that because I hadn't really thought of it in those ways. You know, you've given us a lot of really interesting insights and you both come at this from a different way. Let's have you both chat with us about culture. I mean, Dr. John, you said something really interesting about breaking it down, self actualizing almost to saying, I did this, I appreciate it. You know, that self talk, my son-in-law has taught me this thing that I say now all the time, spiral up, think about yourself spiraling up as opposed to spiraling down. And you know, I love that because for some reason in my mind, I can see that. You know, keep spiraling up, go up, go up. Don't go down. How do we start this almost like in a cultural way where we walk through the door or we jump onto Zoom or we send an email and we're communicating these things? Well, two things to start with. One is what you were just saying, the spiraling up instead of the spiraling down, that's a paradigm shift. And I have a lot of history with spiraling down. I spent a lot of my life going in that direction sort of into the black hole. And I learned to stop that. It was something, a behavior I inherited from my dad. I went to school on him. That's how I learned to do it, but I had to unlearn it. So I had to replace it with instead of going to the black hole, I needed to go somewhere else. And so that's the second thing I would say is a culture of continuous learning and growth comes out of celebrating anything and everything. So if you come to our daily staff meeting every morning, the first thing everyone checks in and everyone celebrates everything we can from the day before, client meetings, proposals, wins, losses, we celebrate the losses because we know the losses are part of getting to the next win. And my wife and I, when we're out walking the dogs every morning and every evening, we have a little tradition. If anyone's cranky, which might happen on occasion to one of us, the other person has the right to say drop and give me five. And that means give me five celebrations. And what that does is actually shifts our whole state of being when we start seeing positive things about who we are and what we've been doing. I love that. I think I'm gonna have to employ that in about 12 hours, 10 hours. John Tiso, what are you all doing? And what are you seeing and what are you learning from as you lead your teams? I know you have a diverse workforce. They're remote, started remote more than what, 25 years ago, right? 30, okay, pardon me. That's revolutionary in itself, worth another conversation for a whole another day. But how do you do that when you don't have that proverbial water cooler that you can stand in front of and try and ramp somebody up? Yep, yep. So certainly not having everyone together does present an extra limiter or a hurdle. But I think for me, it's really centered on, and this is gonna actually tie back to both of the examples that Dr. John provided. It's about the choices that I'm making. Every day I have a full calendar and I absolutely have more than enough justifiable reasons to choose to cancel that next meeting with someone. But I instead choose not to and through that follow up on that meeting and then figure out whatever else on the backend. Historically, I had made a lot of my decisions without really deciding myself. It was one of those classic, I already made the decision and then figured out why I did it. And that consciousness is where that pattern starts to break. And I have found that's where on my own growth journey and development of my leadership skills, that's where my lynchpin of my growth was, was slowing down enough to be able to ask myself, what's going on before I start making choices? And eventually that expands out where I can start nurturing others to do the same. I love that because that's incredibly self-aware and it's gotta be, dare I say, a little scary because you're calling yourself, you're putting yourself in front of the classroom and saying, okay, this is what's going on, right? Yes, and here's where I made mistakes where I could have been better. And that's a way that I lead by example too, is being as much me as I can, living into the vision that I hold for myself and then simply being that way helps foster others to follow. I'm fascinated by this and we don't have much time. I'm gonna go out on a limb and I'm gonna say something that'll probably be so offensive to so many people. But I feel like I have been talking with two females because I don't hear men having this conversation about leadership. I hear women saying it, but tragically, we don't have enough male leaders talking this way. And I think that the nonprofit sector has, you know, is skewed to females anyway and we have a lot of women that go into the sector. So I'm fascinated and I'm actually very hopeful about our sector when I hear this conversation because it just bodes well for all of us, right? I mean, it's just such a, it's, I almost wanna use the word refreshing, but mean it's more than that, it's meaningful. I really have heard a lot from you and it makes me think that we gotta be jumping into coaching and more mentoring and what does that look like to you? And let's start with John Tiso, how obviously, well, I shouldn't say obviously, but it seems to me that you've been a part of this journey and you've been getting this coaching and you've been getting this work done and then you're extending that, right? You're pushing that. Correct, correct. How, what is that arc like? Well, before my growth path began, I kind of lived on my own. I would go out to find sources of guidance and absorb and then would just keep it to myself and apply it where I wanted to use it and that was the end. But through my work with Dr. John and others, I've come to realize, there's a lot more that I could be doing with that. And as I've clued into my purpose of improving the world and the lives of the people around me, that's really helped me align with that and act on it and start more proactively providing that coaching and that mentoring and support to basically anybody that expresses a desire for it. Amazing. Dr. John, how willing and able are people coming to the table to begin this journey? Where you start and where you end, there's a big difference. People are at different places. One of the challenges we have is when someone's been told by a boss, you need coaching. And we have to kind of determine, are we working in a hostage situation? Because if we, it's hard to be successful with someone who doesn't want anything. And one of the first things people work on in coaching is to actually want something. To want greater sense of belonging, to have a greater sense of personal agency, to have a sense of being seen more, being more influential. As John talked about leadership at the beginning of the show about having the ability to influence the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of others. And so the more people want, the more effective the coaching will be. It's interesting because I was talking about this with my husband and he said, he had the most interesting concept or perspective. He's like, you would never be a professional athlete without having a lot of coaches, from nutrition to psychology to behaviors, everything. And for some, and then you really are successful, right? But for some reason in the business world, for profit and non-profit, we don't think of that as a strategic investment or option. Do you see that changing, Dr. John? Do you see people being more open to this and wanting to make those investments? Absolutely. And our model has been, it's been such a great journey and learning journey because as I've done my own getting coached and in other training programs and experiential learning, complimenting the books I've read and the many papers I've written. The sense that we see in our clients is they see it working. And the ones who really see it working the most are the clients where at the very senior level, they're doing the work themselves. They're in their own process of learning and growing. And I'm talking about very mature senior leaders who look like they're essentially done. And one of the reasons they're good is because they don't hold themselves as done. There's more in them they wanna keep developing. And that's, as we wind up, that makes me think that if you have that perspective and that mindset, you can be a better leader about what we were talking about in the very beginning, cultivating that next group and identifying that next group. If you're thinking already about that, you're gonna be able to make better choices that are sustainable for your leadership. This has been amazing. I could talk to you too forever in a day. And I think I'm going to get to because I will be in Boston with both of you in a couple of weeks. John Tiso, Director of Client Services for JMT Consulting. Talk to us about your big event that's coming up. Super, gladly, yes. So JMT has an annual client conference called Innovate. It's all about networking, all about training and education and learning. And we have a bunch of fun doing it all too. It is three days in Boston this year from May 1st to the 3rd. And all our welcome information is on our website. This is the event of the year. I'm telling you, I look forward to it every year. As soon as one ends, I'm ready for the next one. Well, I'm gonna be there. I'm actually, we're gonna have one day where we're broadcasting live from the convention floor, an episode of the nonprofit show. And then I believe I'm gonna be conducting a panel discussion in one of those days. And so Dr. John Davidoff, Founder Chief Mission Officer, Davidoff Mission Driven Business Strategy. Will we see you there in Boston? You will. One of the things that all attendees get is they get a complimentary coaching session with one of our coaches from Davidoff Strategy. You can have it at the conference or you can schedule it before or after the conference. And it's part of the enrollment fee that JMT is offering. And John, what's the normal fee for that? Oh, it's a wide range that can run several hundred dollars. Hey. Okay, well, put my name down. Find me up, cause that is amazing. And I love the spirit of that because you don't know what you don't know. And until you can start to experience this, I just think it's mind-opening. And this has really been great. I love this discussion. We need to have you both on again, talking about more of these critical things. 1.8 million nonprofits registered in America and this has got to be in the top three discussions that nonprofits are having. Where do we go next with our leadership? They're aging out, they're exhausted. We've burned them out because of so many things going on in the last five years. And plus it's tough work. It's tough work. And so this has been just amazing. Hey, another thing that's really amazing is our partners. They include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Staffing Boutique, Your Part-Time Controller, 180 Management Group, Fundraising Academy at National University, JMT Consulting, Nonprofit Tech Talk, and Nonprofit Thought Leaders. These are the folks that join us day in and day out and really afford us these amazing conversations. And it's really exciting. I so appreciate both of you gentlemen coming on, being authentic, sharing your journey and being very open to being vulnerable and talking about what the challenges can be because that's where so many of us are, right? And so this is really cool. Thank you, Julia. Pleasure to be with you and you too, John. Same, same, looking forward to the next time. Yeah, well, we will see each other all of us in a couple of weeks in Boston. Go to jamtconsulting.com and you'll be able to learn more about the conference. You are not sold out yet, quite yet, right? Nope, we still have openings. Okay, great. Well, hey everybody, as we end every episode of the Nonprofit Show, we end with this mantra. And I'm telling you, it means something different to me every day that I say it. And today it really is meaning something completely different. And that the message is today, to stay well, so you can do well. We'll see you back here for another episode of the Nonprofit Show. Thank you, gentlemen.