Here are 3 important mindset shifts that can help strengthen your leadership team’s clarity, connection and alignment – and reduce unnecessary stress.

Before you make a plan, you need to choose a strategy.

Before you choose a strategy, you need to know who you are.

 Many organizations spend significant time, money and effort on strategic planning.

But most of that time is focused on gathering information about the external landscape - things like community needs, funder interests, what other organizations are doing.

Great strategy - and effective strategic plans - requires us to spend an equal amount of time, if not more, reflecting on our internal organization landscape.

I had a great (quick!) trip to New York yesterday to facilitate a team-building and visioning workshop for a client's newly assembled leadership team.

We brought together insights from the group's Working Genius individual assessments and team maps, and we spent time on what it looks like to Lead Change Well.

Here’s what we covered….

Since first learning about the ALICE Threshold at Independent Sector's National Summit last year, I can't stop thinking about it. ALICE stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.

It describes households that earn more than the official U.S. poverty level, but less than what it costs to survive in the counties where they live.

Together, ALICE households and households in poverty fall below the ALICE Threshold: the income needed to afford household basics such as housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, and technology, plus taxes.

In the nonprofit sector, about 1 in 5 nonprofit workers (22%) live in households that fall below the ALICE Threshold.

I’m thrilled to be speaking at the Create Good 2026 conference for nonprofit leaders and communicators March 25-26 in Durham, NC!

My session - Beyond the Big Announcement: Lead Change that Actually Sticks! - is designed for nonprofit leaders and communicators who want to move beyond a “launch and leave” mindset for organizational change and instead lead transitions in ways that truly work.

That feeling when you've just finished a successful on-site strategic retreat for a repeat client you love working with. 🌟

LaFemina & Co. has the privilege of working with nonprofits and foundations doing important work throughout the U.S. and all around the world.

The executive teams and boards we partner with are often working remotely and from many different locations (and time zones!), so the majority of our facilitation work, training, advisory support, and coaching happens online.

This week was different. For the third year in a row, I had the opportunity to facilitate an on-site retreat for a foundation board and staff. Here’s what we focused on.

A friend recently wrote about the disconnect between how funders, boards, and consultants view, speak about and fund change in organizations and how it's lived by the leaders and people who are actually doing the work.

As someone who spends quite a bit of time advising nonprofit executives and boards on organizational change, I see this every day.

Change isn't a checklist
Or a process with easy, predictably timed steps.
Change isn't about creating a false sense of urgency
Or introducing new tools.

Organizational change is about behavior, environment and opportunity.

We tend to romanticize growth – focusing on the bright, shiny results without examining how they came to be.

The truth about growth is that it’s often uncomfortable and messy – happening in pieces, in fits and starts, and following no perfect plan.

Just ask our bearded dragon, Kiwi.

So often, conversations among nonprofit executive teams and boards of directors are focused on growth.

Growth in revenue.
Growth in the number of supporters & people served.
Growth in impact.
Growth in the number of staff & volunteers.

There are many societal, historical, and situational realities that make us default to this lens of “getting bigger” and “doing more.”

But this lens represents only one facet of growth.

Our house shook this morning.

The kind of vibration that makes you understand, in an instant, that something big, unusual, and concerning has happened.

It turned out a neighbor’s tree couldn’t withstand the wind and rain from this morning’s storm.

And so here we are.