action planning

Notes from a Strategic Planning Session

Published June 26, 2018 | By deborah

Ah…back on the road again after being home for the entire month of October (thanks, Jewish holidays!)

As I was facilitating a strategic planning session for a

15 Ways to Break the Law of the Instrument

Published September 16, 2016 | By deborah

Hammer, 3D rendering isolated on white background Psychologist Abraham Maslow once famously remarked: “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” That’s known as The Law of the Instrument – and many of us have one or two well-worn instruments, tools, and approaches that we use to help our colleagues, friends and family solve problems.

I know this first-hand: A decade ago after I graduated from coaching school I realized that my version of The Law of the Instrument was, “When what you are is a coach, every problem looks coachable.” Since one of the most useful tools in the coaching toolkit is curiosity, I asked a lot of questions. I mean, a LOT of questions. It got to the point that I would ask my kids, “How was your day at school?” or “What would you like for dinner?” and would hear, in response, “Are you trying to coach me???”

Point taken. Even though Albert Einstein himself said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning,” the people around me said, “Please give your questioning a rest.”

Now, ten years and hundreds of clients later, I now have a wide range of instruments that I can use to be helpful, depending on whether someone wants direction, advice, support, empathy, instruction, problem-solving or yes, coaching. And it took a lot of work to cultivate a toolkit where I could feel equally comfortable pulling out any instrument and using it well. But the most important development for me was not assuming that I knew what help my client, colleague, friend or kid wanted or needed, but offering them a robust list of helpful approaches from which they could choose. Chances are, you have one or two well-worn instruments that you use regularly (such as problem-solving or brainstorming) and it might be time for you to add some new ones to your toolkit.

You might like the feel of a new instrument in your hand – and you might be able to help the people you work, volunteer and live with might have a breakthrough that wouldn’t have been possible with the tools you’ve been using.

Ready to break the Law of the Instrument? Here is my list of 15 new ones to offer:

Listen without judgment
Ask open-ended questions
Play “Devil’s Advocate”
Brainstorm 50 new ideas
Empathize
Connect you to an expert in the field
Teach you a skill
Share my own experience/path
Give a pep talk/cheerlead
Help you prioritize
Take notes while you download your thoughts
Help you develop evaluation criteria
Do it along side you
Send you articles, videos and other resources
Fix it for you

What are some other instruments you use? Post below.

When is Climate Change a GOOD Thing?

Published February 23, 2015 | By deborah

“Because of our traditions, we’ve kept our balance for many, many years. Here in Anatevka, we have traditions for everything.

How to sleep, how to eat, how to work, how to wear clothes…

You may ask how did this tradition get started? I’ll tell you.
I don’t know.
But it’s a tradition!” – Tevye, Fiddler on the Roof

We all know that traditions can be sacred. We also know that traditions can be comforting. But when you think about some of the interpersonal and institutional “traditions” that our organizations uphold, they can feel crazy-making and soul-sucking.

Traditions like what? Like:

“We openly and honestly express our opinions…unless we’re talking to someone who can write a big check.”

“Supervision meetings are the first to get cancelled when something’s got to give.”

“We talk about the importance of work-life balance but reward those who come early, stay late, and are on e-mail ‘round the clock.”

We call these traditions our organizations’ “culture,” as in, “that’s the culture around here.” And we often say we want to change the culture, and then get defeated when we feel like it will take too long, or we don’t have the authority, or we can’t get the buy-in.

My take: stop trying to change your culture (“the way we do things around here”), and start working to change your climate (“the way I do things around here”). Think about how you speak, behave, and interact with others, as well as the messages you share about your colleagues, volunteers, organization, and community, and focus on contributing something powerfully positive. Ask that the people with whom you work directly do the same. You may not be able to create a massive shift in the well-worn traditions of your organization, but you can certainly make a healthy and helpful difference right now in the work and lives of the people you touch everyday.

After all, as David Ben-Gurion remarked, “Tradition must be a springboard into the future, not an armchair for repose.”

The Most Important Sentence in Delegation

Published March 10, 2014 | By deborah

For more on this topic and 10 other topics,

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The Chicken or the Egg – Part II

Published July 2, 2013 | By deborah

By Jane Stein

So, rumor has it that some of you had a bit of a conversation around my last blog “What comes first, Of course since I live in the 1950’s, in other words not on Facebook, I have absolutely no idea what all you guys said. But thanks to my dear fellow My Jewish Coach, Donna Schwartz, I have, in spite of crashing my 1950’s computer, kicking and screaminly entered your universe and joined Facebook!!!

the chicken or the egg?”

As soon as I accomplished this ever so mighty feat, I felt really proud of my very clever self. But there was one small problem…I have absolutely no idea what to do now. And most importantly, I have no idea how to communicate with you guys (please note that a guy is very often a woman!) when each and every one of you decide that the following is something you simply do not agree with!

Yes. I still believe NO MONEY – NO MISSION. Yes, the MONEY must come first. That being said, without a compelling mission, (remember your really, really really great idea from last month?) finding the money is gonna be a tad difficult. Does that mean that the MISSION comes first? Hum. I do believe that we are now smack dab back in that whole chicken and egg conundrum.

So now here are the three Jane P. Stein recommendations for getting around this whole mishegas.

1. Take that really really really great idea – now becoming in your own mind a sorta mission statement – and call the very smartest person you know. To qualify who this particular very smart person should be, it needs to be someone with a whole boat load of money and a willingness to part with it for organizations with compelling missions (you know…that guy with the philanthropic soul).

2. Make an appointment (a date for coffee or “just 15 minutes of your time at your office”) to meet face to face.

3. Use the nine magic words “I really would love to pick your amazing brain” followed very quickly (no breathing allowed) by the eight even more magical words “I promise I won’t ask you for money”.

And BINGO! You are on your way!! This is your opportunity to test drive your idea. Call it your very own personal feasibility study (and just like those fancy and very expensive feasibility studies we all know and don’t particularly love) your very smart person knows that you will be back one day asking for money! But at this meeting, DO NOT ASK FOR MONEY…and if this very smart person begs you to take money to get started, please, please keep your promise and DO NOT TAKE THE MONEY. You are there to paint the picture of how much better the world will be with the implementation of your mission idea. This is your chance to engage another person into dreaming your dream with you.

Of course if you cannot engage this very smart person into dreaming with you, it may be time to go back to the drawing board. No engagement, no money. No money, no mission.

But if you see this guy’s eyes light up. And you see this guy move forward to the edge of that great big scary office chair, pitch your little heart out, but be sure that you take a whole lot of the time to get input from the very smart person.

Because once that input starts getting put in, you will find yourself with a new partner to your dream…one with the money (and the friends and the contacts and the connections) to get your mission up and running. And then guess what???? MONEY AND MISSION!!!

The Chicken or the Egg

Published June 5, 2013 | By deborah

By Jane Stein

So, which comes first: the money or the mission? “Why, the mission of course” you answer ever so confidently.

But are you sure?

Let’s think about this. How many of you have had a really, really, really good idea for a new program, project or maybe even a whole new nonprofit organization? I see a few hands going up back there in the audience. Good for you: idea first. And then what happened?

Maybe you went to the Board of your JCC or Federation. Maybe you went to the program chair, the executive director, your puppy. And what was said to you in response to your really, really, really good idea?? (Woof does not count here) Great idea! Go find the money and we will move right ahead with it.

What happened next? My guess is that you stuffed that really, really, really good idea right back into your brain and said something to yourself like “I will do that just as soon as I win the Lottery”. And you might have even gone out and bought three lottery tickets to insure that you would be able to implement your really, really, good idea.

I work with a lot of nonprofit organizations, both Jewish and non-Jewish. And I hear a lot of really, really, really good ideas. I teach classes on building and running nonprofit organizations and I hear a lot of really, really, really good ideas. And I always say, “What a really, really, really good idea! How are you going to pay for that?” Now I have many students who say to me “my idea is soooo good that G-d will provide” and we will be up and running very soon.

And to them — and to everyone else — and to you, too — I say “NO MONEY – NO MISSION!”

Raising money, most folks say, is NOT EASY. I think that is because those same folks are thinking “Let’s do a wallk/run” or “Let’s do a big gala” or my personal favorite “Let’s do a golf tournament”. And believe you me, this is NOT the way to get that really, really, really good idea funded. Special events fund raising is time consuming (how many of you have spent 21 ½ hours stuffing goodie bags?), volunteer draining (did you know it takes approximately 932 volunteers to run a run?), dependent on the weather (did I tell you the one about the monsoon over Virginia Beach during our Great Dig for Cystic Fibrosis?), your region’s calendar of special events (I know you checked to see what was happening in the Jewish world that day, but did you know that the Foodbank, Habitat for Humanity, Special Olympics and the American Cancer Society were all holding events that day? Didn’t think so. Did you know that it is really, really, really hard to raise money for a special event if you have no major sponsors to cover the expenses and all of your participants are participating somewhere else? (But more about the raising of major sponsors in a later blog)

It is really, really, really quite simple. The best way to get your really, really, really good idea to become a reality is to begin at the beginning and start to build some really, really, really good relationships with the folks in your community who have three attributes: 1 – a philanthropic soul, 2 – the money to do something with that philanthropic soul and 3 – a wonderful group of friends/acquaintances/business buddies who love and trust them. And that is where the money for your mission will best be found.

So, next time you have a really, really, really good idea, read my blogs! Because over the next few months they are going to be full of ways to raise money without the worries, stress, aggravation or hassle, or as we would say in Yiddish, all the tsuris!

There Once was a Little Old Lady

Published May 3, 2013 | By deborah

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By Jane Stein

There once was a little old lady from Minsk…or was it Pinsk…or Krakow or Lodz or Timisoara…and I took her picture.

But wait a minute…let me back up and tell you the story. Once upon a time I travelled a lot…and all of my travel was to visit the Jews of Eastern Europe…what so many of you called the “remnants of the Holocaust.” I was very blessed in that I had the opportunity to travel with either the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) or with the Jewish Federations of North America (then called UJA or the United Jewish Communities depending on just how far back we are going here). The other night when I was sitting at a very, very boring speaker I was trying to count just how many of these places I actually visited. (OK, I smiled at the speaker and looked focused and engaged, honest.) I came up with something like twenty to twenty five visits… seven of those were just one four day trip to Romania with my husband and Zvi Feine of the JDC where we stopped to meet with the “Jewish Community Leadership Board” in each and every shtetlach from Timisoara up to Bucharest.

And everywhere I went, I took pictures of the beautiful people that I met. Now some of you are too young to remember the days of something called “film”. It was this stuff that was in your camera (another foreign concept to many of you) and when you filled up a “roll” of this stuff, you took it to a magical place where the round roll was turned into pictures on paper, and they were almost always in duplicate. Then you took these pictures home and, if you were as well organized as I was, you tossed them into a drawer. And if you travelled as much as I did and you took as many pictures as I did and you got duplicate copies as I did and you ended up with lots and lots of drawers of lots and lots of pictures! Get the picture?

All of this was just fine, unless one day you are asked to write an article about your years of work with the JDC and the Jewish Federations of North America. And of course since we all know that the facts of our stories from these visits are really best represented by the faces of the people we have met, you need a picture.

And that is where my trouble began. I opened the first drawer and there were pictures, lots of pictures, all with no names, dates, and worse of all NO PLACES. I went to the second drawer. Same thing. And the third drawer…again…no identifying information. And everyone looked the same!! Grey hair ever so neatly combed, lovely small smile, sparkling eyes. I panicked….how was I going to tell my story without a picture??? And I couldn’t possibly write the first word of my article until I had overcome this miserable feeling of panic.

So, I did what I often do in times of crises? Yelled at myself, cried, threw things. And then went for a long walk. And since the weather was a perfect sunny 60 degrees, within one block I had my epiphany: it absolutely did not matter that I could not tell one face from the other…that I had no idea which lovely woman was from which shtetl, because the point of the story was not that one specific woman, but the fact that she existed at all and that we, the organized world Jewish community, had made her life in this, the 21^st Century not only possible, but filled with joy.

And so I went back to my computer and began to type away, telling the story of the amazing Jewish communities of Romania, Hungary, Poland, what was once Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Former Soviet Union. I wrote about how each town has (no matter how teeny tiny that town might be) a cultural center, education programs, Gans, Chesed Avrahams (the JDC version of Jewish Family Service), young leadership programs. All of the things that make up a Jewish community, even the politics and the grown ups telling the young folks “you can’t do that — we tried it and it didn’t work” Honest, I heard it for myself from the Young Adult Division of the Warsaw Jewish Community!!!. And while I am on that topic, a Young Adult Division of the Warsaw Jewish Community?? Who would have believed that would ever, ever, ever be possible back a mere twenty years ago?

And I scanned a picture into the article. It was a picture of a woman, grey hair ever so neatly combed, lovely small smile, sparkling eyes, and I typed “The Beginning” and hit send.

Great Question #1 from a Strategic Planning Session

Published October 30, 2008 | By deborah

Ah…back on the road again after being home for the entire month of October (thanks, Jewish holidays!)

As I was facilitating a strategic planning session for a Jewish group, one member posed a terrific question about how the group would vet its activities: “How do we make sure our efforts are sustainable?”

I often use this question with coaching clients as well – clients who are looking to make a significant change in behavior or activities (such as lose weight, network more, etc.) If you can get past the hurdle of starting something, your next hurdle is likely to be the sustainability of the process. How long can you do what you’re doing? What do you need to consider or adjust in order to keep it going?

Is eating only salads sustainable? How about skipping all desserts? How long will this last?

But of course, this isn’t the only great question…

Tune in for the second part!

Deborah Grayson Riegel
www.myjewishcoach.com
www.myjewishcoach.blogspot.com

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