If the board only meets monthly, or quarterly, it’s hard to fully process complex matters in those few hours. Sometimes that serves the organization well as the board is logistically forced to slow things down, which allows for more perspective, processing, and even prayer.

But sometimes it’s a problem when staff are left waiting for decisions that impact their work, and even their lives. While the board steps away from the issue until their next meeting, the staff live in tension, conflict, or uncertainty day to day.

For almost all of us, the effort required to turn a weakness into a strength is massive and it takes away the potential to truly excel in our natural areas of giftedness. It’s also not much fun.

So, take a honest look at your reality and aspirations. My guess is that some of those weaknesses you feel compelled to master are like my math classes. You need to get good enough that they don’t prevent you from doing what you do best, but beyond that they don’t really matter.

It’s rarely a single decisive failure.

Almost every time it’s an accumulation of smaller errors, misunderstandings, or disagreements that culminate in a situations where the cost of rebuilding trust is too high. That’s a hard thing to explain to someone who has sincerely been trying their best.

Like so many things in life, the final straw isn’t the biggest.

Dorothy shows up. And with her accidental destruction of your oppressor, soon followed by the same for her equally dangerous sister witch, your people are ready to celebrate: Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead!!

But imagine what happens next…

As I’m working a lot with executive and leadership teams I often found myself trying to jury-rig tools and concepts from those two areas to fit the particular needs of these groups. It’s been good, but not great. I knew there were missing pieces. I just couldn’t figure out what they were.

Last week something clicked into place.

Here’s one for your next team meeting: Ask what long term effects COVID continues to have on how your organization functions.

There are some fairly obvious things. More people working from home or hybrid, we’re all pretty familiar with Zoom, you probably still have hand sanitizer easily accessible in your workspaces.

But what about the deeper, less apparent effects?

The beautiful passion that fuels so many at the beginning of their involvement struggles with the limitations of funding, human frailty, and the sense that even the best practices can produce unexpected or disappointing results.

The reality check can be harsh.

I learn a lot from the way people respond when a colleague gets upset. There’s usually a little awkwardness, someone offers some tissues, a hand on the shoulder or even a hug isn’t rare. Those are, when they are wanted, good things.

Seeing who takes those steps tells me something about the group dynamics that several temperament tests might not show.

*Phone buzzes with an incoming text message*

“Hey Chris do you have ten minutes?’

It happens a couple times pretty much every week; and I like it.

Her tone in bringing up the feedback was calm, even light. Nothing triggering about it at all.

And yet…

Just the prospect of receiving feedback had me experiencing a sudden wave of stress before I could even put words to it. At the core of my brain my amygdala was preparing for trouble. I was reacting to a threat before I had any real reason to perceive one.

What happened was, we had finished everything we needed to talk about.

It’s that simple. We were done so we stopped.

There have been times when I’ve sat with leaders, teams, and boards and helped them try to discern what rebuilding trust was going to take. How much time, effort, emotion, and outside help was needed to get through the damaged relationships and into a healthier dynamic. It’s almost always more than we first think.

Without this perspective we easily become short term thinkers, overly competitive with our peers, obsessive about our own performance, and vulnerable to our insecurities. We do dumb stuff because we’re more worried about the operations than the outcomes.

There is a risk in using any identity to put ourselves or others in a box (“an introvert could never be a great public speaker”) or to excuse inappropriate behaviour (“I’m not being a jerk I’m just high on the Dominance scale in DISC”).

It’s also advisable to hold any label gently. We are much more than any demographic, diagnosis, or profile. And we, and our surrounding cultures, always have potential to change.

One mark of experienced leaders is the ability to anticipate what comes with their choices. Wisdom tells us that something we like often comes with something less appealing included and we can’t always substitute it. It’s part of the same dish.

Like cleaning out the junk drawer in your desk or kitchen, you won’t actually find yourself with nothing better to do than pick up those tasks that weren’t important to do in the fall, winter, or spring but still felt like they should be on a list somewhere.

If we’re honest we have to admit that all of us are wearing costumes of some sort everyday to portray something about who we are and what matters to us. The corporate office blazer isn’t much different from the bright yellow Pikachu costume.

If you want a healthy board-staff dynamic one of the easiest things you can do to improve things is just show up.

They felt that their personal integrity was being compromised by being associated with a leader who seemed to have abandoned the core values of the organization in pursuit of something they couldn’t support. But they still believed that the actual work they were involved in was good and impacting vulnerable people in significant ways.

It was a real problem.

This isn’t meant to be a political statement, but a practical one. As charity leaders in Canada we need to learn from the past and recognize the current reality; relying on the USA for programs, partners, or supporters was never a sure thing and it’s probably getting more difficult.