Consulting, Coaching, and Interim Leadership that Gets Your Mission Moving

January 1 gets too much credit. Here’s what the research says about fresh starts, reflection, and the small plans that actually help you follow through on 2027.

I recently had the chance to hear Robert Egger speak at an event hosted by South Sound Partners for Philanthropy, and I walked out feeling like someone had finally put my thoughts into words. For years, I have been standing in front of community groups asking a version of the same question. Egger asked it better than I ever have, and I want to share what stuck with me.

If someone hands you a financial statement and you cannot tell the difference between a healthy fund balance and a red flag, what do you do? Some people go quiet and rubber-stamp whatever is put in front of them. Others go the opposite direction.

A look at Hagitude, gendered ageism, and who still gets called wise There was a time — and it wasn't so long ago, depending on which culture and which century you're standing in — when a woman who had lived long enough to raise a family, bury a few people she loved, run a household or a village council or a healing practice, was the person you went to when you needed real judgment. She was the elder. The one who'd seen enough cycles to know which crisis was actually a crisis

When an organization falls apart — whether from a board that lost its grip on governance, or an executive who ran the place into the ground, or some tangled combination of both — what do we actually owe each other?

Sometimes founders and long-tenured leaders want to stay for the wrong reasons: they don't know what to do next, they haven't planned for their retirement, their identity is with the organization, or they don't think the organization can survive without them.

Never publicly shame anyone — this approach leads to resentment, damaged morale, and a workplace culture headed toward toxicity. That's not a culture any of us wants to build — especially not in mission-driven organizations where trust and psychological safety are foundational. Time for grace.

Height is visible and immediate. Unlike interests, values, or personality, a person's height registers the second you see them.

One of the most disorienting things about accumulating genuine expertise is that it can start to feel like a liability.

Writing this wasn't just an exercise in sharing wisdom — it was me working through my own reckoning out loud, because that's the only way I know how to do hard things.

Permission to grief as the ground shifts beneath us

As CEO, you become the default container for every emotional overflow in the organization.

The very thing that draws people to nonprofit work—deep passion for a cause—can also become the source of an organization's greatest challenges.

2026 doesn't have to be about perfection. It's about progress, growth, and showing up for yourself in ways that actually matter.

We've all been there. You announce a team retreat or all-hands meeting, and someone immediately responds: "Great! But PLEASE, no icebreakers."

Perhaps the most transformative leadership philosophy to emerge in recent decades is servant leadership, introduced by Robert Greenleaf in his groundbreaking 1970 essay The Servant as Leader.

As nonprofit leaders, we regularly pour time and resources into planning retreats for our organizations, yet rarely give ourselves even a fraction of that time to reflect on our leadership.

A lack of understanding about the basics of rewards can result in some unanticipated results causing your employees to not feel rewarded and even feel punished because of your reward programs.

The numbers tell a compelling story. According to McKinsey & Company, the nation's 1,000 largest corporations have committed $200 billion to racial equity since 2020, with the majority coming from financial institutions.

Thanks to Harvard Business Review for this insightful look at strategic planning and where we can fail at reaching our goals: https://hbr.org/2017/11/many-strategies-fail-because-theyre-not-actually-strategies One major reason for the lack of action is that “new strategies” are often not strategies at all. A real strategy involves a clear set of choices that define what the firm is going to do and what it’s not going to do. Many strategies fail to get implemented, despite th