Dr. Patton McDowell has spent his entire professional career leading organizations and developing high-performing leaders across the nonprofit sector.
You might have caught my conversation with Patton a few weeks ago on his show, Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership. If you didn’t, you should check it out. We had an in-depth conversation on the impact of toxic leadership in organizations.
We got together to talk about the launch of Patton’s new book, Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership. This book is really a roadmap for leadership development in our sector.
Here are some great takeaways that you can act on immediately to help you become a better leader.
7 Steps on the path to nonprofit leadership:
- Sharpen your vision
- Map your course
- Get in shape
- Curate knowledge
- Express yourself
- Build community
- Practice leadership
Patton also identifies 5 keys to nonprofit excellence:
- Develop a clarity of vision
- Focus on developing staff and board talent
- Build internal and external partnerships
- Commit to all five phases of the fundraising cycle
- Innovate, but also measure with accountability
A few other great key ideas from Patton’s book and our conversation:
- Every leader needs a personal board of directors. This is a high-level set of strategic relationships to help you refine and enhance your leadership skills and keep you accountable to your commitments
- Every leader needs an executive learning plan. This should include your learning goals, how you’ll achieve them, and the key takeaways you’ve gleaned from all the learning you’ve done.
- Every great leader needs to network strategically. This allows you to develop broad and deep relationships, build and grow relationships with peers and those whom you aspire to become a peer with, and creates new and unique learning opportunities
- The last two years have caused immense stress and frustration in our sector. As a leader, you need to model healthy habits like unplugging, getting actual time out of the office, and recharging from time to time.
- If you’re struggling and fighting burnout, one unconventional way to navigate that is to coach someone else. When you focus on investing in others, it does wonders for your own mental and emotional health.
- The nonprofit organizations that will succeed in the future are those that are focused on and investing in their talent development pipelines.
The last thing Patton leaves us with in our conversation, is the importance of our mission, especially when we face adversity.
You owe it to yourself and your developing leadership skills to listen to this conversation and invest in your own leadership development.