Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.
So welcome to the good community. We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropist, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
So let's get started. Hey, Becky,
oh my gosh, we are about to have the best time we are already having
so much fun. Like we're having a stitch already.
I just want to say that this is the best dressed man in the words of ZZ Top that we have ever had on the podcast. And we have our first bow tie today.
already. I think the stories and just the life that you live is just so fascinating. And it's threaded together with really perpetuating so much goodness in our sector and challenging us, in the best of ways. So it is my honor to introduce Mark Pittman to the podcast, we're really excited for today's conversation. Mark is an international leadership coach, you may have seen him at your favorite conference because he's been there. But he really has poured himself out through a lot of different outlets, but specifically loving and serving leaders and really trying to equip them and telling them, it's okay to have that imposter syndrome. It's okay to have doubt. In fact, he wrote the book on this and it dropped last year. And it's something that we really want to dive in today of how do we embrace that doubt? How do we how do we turn that into something that can help you be more exceptional? So no, we're taking notes over here because we feel like imposters all the time. I kind of feel like that's sitting across from Mark today. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here. And you're right. I've already just I haven't had so much fun in it before we start broadcasting. I mean, we're just having a blast. So thank you for all you're doing too. And thanks for making my ego feel great. I can't wait to send this to my parents to say hey, look, I made something on my print this
printed out and put it on the fridge. Okay. So
you know, take us back. I mean, you had this incredible career, you've got this really beautiful tight knit family that has just been showing up and serving in the sector kind of tell us your journey and what has led you to really focusing on leadership and fundraising.
Wow. Well, I was born in a young age my parents names are mom and dad. It's shocking. I
know so many commonalities.
When I was growing up, one of the things that was really fun about my family was I thought was fun. Other people thought was really awkward was that I had two sets of homework, homework for school, and I had homework for being a Pitman. So my school homework was all the stuff you get in school. And then being a Pitman, I had to read things like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People I had to read Brian Tracy, Florence Littauer on little silver boxes and how to be nice to people and stuff on DISC personality theory and, and I had to listen to positive motivational speakers as well. My parents get into Amway at some point in that journey. And so they drag us to the seminars and rallies. So I was as a teenager learning about goal setting life goals, checking hearing some of the top motivational speakers talking about checking your goals off your list. In fact, when I was I think it was in my 20s I think I'd gotten out of my teens, I wrote down a list of goals that I wanted by decade to the age of 120. And I figured I can negotiate after that. I've been looking for that a lot because I just turned half a century this at the time of this recording, I just turned 50 So I'm trying to figure out where I'm at and the goals list. So goals and leadership have always been something that's been part of my kind of the the water I've swam in. In college I got a scholarship that required lower grades because they expect you to be in in leadership and in changing things in leadership. After college, I fell into fundraising I got into admissions and I loved two things I love one is helping people find their purpose really live in their purpose and embrace it and and their unique ways. Not in a sort of glad handing. You know, we're all we're all okay, everybody's okay. But in a in a way that sincere, you are a gift, the part of the reason that you're on this planet is something profoundly important. Let's be that. And the fact that you have limits is profoundly important because that means you can rely on other people. So I love that and the admissions work at the college was perfect for that because I got to talk to people at a pivotal part of their journey where they're going off to college, and I had the permission to say no, you don't fit. This is not a good school for you or we would be a bad fit for you. But here's some places that you'd like that would would be good. Or we could be a really great fit for you. The development office recruited me after because they said you know, may 1, it gets weird if you're talking to the students. May 1 United States is when you decide. So the development people recruited me Bob Grinnell was my first development boss and met and longtime mentor who said We get to have those values, conversations with people all their lives throughout the year. And it doesn't have to end we get to help them keep investing in things that they care about. And hopefully, it'll be us as well. So I fell into fundraising, thought I was going to be a pastor think the universe or God had mercy on the congregation, I did pass relator. But there was a 15 year gap of like real life that happened, which is really good. Because I get to learn a lot of the questions instead of giving a lot of the answers.
I just have to say, Mark, one year funny.
looks aren't everything. I love your
energy. I love how joyful you are. I love your spirit and your passion. And it's just a good day when we can just dive into the annals of leadership. And I just think about this incredible brand that you have created and what you've stood up to sort of build these frameworks for us to be aspirational and to think about our mindsets. And it's so much deeper than than just personality analysis and going to seminars, but the story of what your mom and dad did mom and dad Pittman, I'm so proud of you for being such evolved parents. And I think Sophia and Julia are about to get some, I don't know some light for the sandwich
began about a decade. My parents read your book and they started. But but my parents they were as they were learning these people skills and things like the how to create actionable tasks that actually get things done. Like what you're saying about the personality assessments. It's not just the assessment. It's what do you do with it? So yeah, you could navel gaze all you want, but there's got it there. What's the result of the navel gazing? So that's where they just couldn't believe that we weren't being taught that in schools? Why aren't people learning this? Why aren't they learning how to build a personal brand? Why aren't people learning this and it made so yeah, that I think those were all I'm so grateful for the family I grew up in as odd and weird, as we were.
Weird is the color of this world. And I those are my people. So I just really love your story. And I and I love this challenge to just go deeper in your leadership analysis. And I and I sense this, like so much. It's a journey. And it's not like if you become an a leader or an ED, you've arrived, and you can never evolve again, it's this is something we just have to work on all the time. And so we would love for you to kind of dive into, you know, what do you think are sort of the hallmarks of a successful nonprofit leader today. And I say that with a lot of weight behind it, because the nonprofit leader of today is not the nonprofit leader from two years ago, the world is so different. And we would love to just get your bent on this, and what you are seeing sort of trending right now.
So I think for, first of all, all the nonprofit CEOs, executive directors that are listening, thank you. I think that two of the things that are so important for leaders today to understand is that nonprofits aren't businesses. There's, there's been so much, I think, well intentioned but misguided, saying we have to run more like a business, the fundamental tax structure, at least in the United States is that nonprofits aren't businesses. So they're the executive director has all of the responsibility to decisions, but none of the authority to make them because the board governs the nonprofit, that's part of how it gets to be a community centered organization. So learning to live in that tension of I'm responsible for staff, employment satisfaction, mission outcomes, and all. But I don't I still have this other group I have to go to. And sometimes even though the boss is that one group, sometimes each of the individual board members think they're the boss, which is also problematic. So I would say getting used to governance and a nonprofit figuring out what governance really is. What are the board's limits, I meet regularly with local senior executive directors and CEOs on Zoom, but they're local for our AFP chapter. And one of the CEOs last month was saying how she had a decision she had to make. And she then stopped herself and said, Is this a governance issue or practical day to day thing? And she decided was practical day to day, so she didn't need the board's approval. And it was, that kind of thinking is critical. Because board members are awesome. If you're a board member listening to this, thank you. And if you're a staff member of a nonprofit, you should be serving on a board. Because you need to figure out what it's like for the people that are overseeing your organization, what they're dealing with and how they're coming into play. That's already in process and they're not the experts. I have high expectations for my board when I'm an employee, and then I become a board member and I realize, you know, this isn't their life. Okay, so how can we make this easier for them? So learning governance and learning how to deal with the board? I don't know what your experience has been, but my coaching executive directors, often it could take up to 30% of their time, board relations, working with the board We're going to personalities of the board trying to get the board on board correctly, because we don't treat our board members while we just expect them to know what to do. Like those little dinosaurs where you take them out of a pill, put water on, and they pop up and be a dinosaur. Remember those toys? So we think that the board members are going to do that. And as my late friend simonia would say no board member wakes up in the morning saying, How can I be a lousy board member today. So we need to set the expectations for what it means to be a good board member and be willing to tell people No, you're not going to be this isn't a good fit for you. The board isn't a good fit, because we actually need people that will prioritize the meetings. And that doesn't sound like the season of life you're in right now. So we'll come back to that or if we come back to in a few years. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, if you're a nonprofit, or looking to be a nonprofit, Executive Director or looking to be one, you have to understand fundraising no matter how much you like it or not, the number of nonprofit executive directors, I think they can subcontract fundraising to someone else blows my mind. And I've been at this 25 years, and it's consistent. They think somebody else should do the fundraising. That would be like a shopkeeper opening up a store and saying, but all the sales and marketing should be somebody else. I don't want to have to figure out how to get people into my store. And I don't have to figure out how to get them to buy the stuff. I just want to have a shop. I just want to hear on main street of the store. And yeah, we all want to just do our thing without having to work on stuff we don't like. But that's not life, at least on this planet that I've found so far. So I think it would really behoove people to figure out what is good fundraising is counterintuitive. It's not educating people. If you know, one of the myths I hear on boards and in staffs a lot is, well, if we were just to educate people, they come to give to us. And that's not true, because we get educated, educated, a lot of things that we don't take action on, we just get filled with information. So we need to learn how to drive people to action, copywriting skills, fundraising letters that are effective, and how to do it in an equitable way. There's really good conversations going on now about equity and the power dynamics of donors and nonprofits and beneficiaries, and how do we equalize that playing field. But we need to be as we need leaders that are versed, really well versed in that, and then can trust their fundraising staff? Because they're not second guessing the fundraising staff and their own ignorance?
Well, you know, I want to circle back what you said about businesses, because this is something that we talk about a lot, because, honestly, there is a dichotomy at play. We think that you know, the partnerships that are emerging right now, are really interesting how nonprofit is partnering with businesses in a unique way, especially with the rise of CSR, CSI, in that whole aspect. But at the same time, we feel like from spending our careers and nonprofit, there's a lot of mentalities that business have gotten right in terms of entrepreneurial mindsets and hacks and using technology that nonprofits are sorely behind. So we always talk about thinking like a business, but I get what you're saying. And I just want to give you the opportunity to respond or push back against us, because we think the mentality of thinking that way is positive. Whereas clearly, structurally, we're different and different for a reason.
Thank you for that, because there is a lot more nuance in there. That's absolutely right there. One of the things that is really frustrating for me in the nonprofit space is nonprofits are kind of fundamentally risky, especially the small the minute, you know, 80% of us nonprofits are under a million dollars in revenue. So there's this entrepreneurial, social entrepreneurial risk taking attitude that a lot of people go into it with, and they get killed, because there's they're not allowed to take risk. The board wants to play it safe. Nobody get fired for doing what they did last year. You try a fundraising appeal, and it fails miserably. That is seen as a huge problem when it should be celebrated as a win, hey, we found something that didn't work, I think, you know, good for us for trying something new. It's mostly the board members that are saying you have to think like a business. Because then they're usually saying we have to sell T shirts, and we have to buy billboards. So that's the part I think, by the automation. My friend, Chris Davenport, and I, who started we started the nonprofit storytelling conference. And that was one of the things we thought we were going to be teaching. And that was how to do business automation. Because you can leverage your personality, you can have a small staff but leverage your reach by automating tasks. And and the same thing is with fundraising letters, they shouldn't have to be figured out every time. You should have a fundraising letter that you send in the spring and a fundraising letter you send in the fall. It doesn't have to be you know, maybe a little tweaks but yeah, there's a lot of customization and optimization that could be happening. So I'm I'm on board with that for sure.
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I am going back into my public relations world that I had like an early early in my life, and I'm just feeling so much the confluence of having different languages in the for profit in the nonprofit world and how that completely stymies us. And so I do think that there's some value in thinking like a business because if to your point, in your example, a board member says no, no, no, we can't do that, that failed. And they're employing that scarcity mindset. That's probably also a CEO of a company who is heavily paying his head salesman or saleswoman and and when they fail, they're failing forward. And they're, you know, they're invested upon and they like that they learn from that we grow from that. And we've got a brand new set right there, Becky, that's
great about asking the board members, how would you do this in your business? Because I was when when I was running our foundation for hospital, I was setting 17,000 The same letters to everybody because we hadn't segmented our database. And he was able to one of my board members said, Wait a minute, you're sending. So I was pitching like, well, let's have some database analytics done. And he said, You don't know who you're emailing. So we have their addresses. But he said, You said I'd go out of business, if I just broadcast email, you know, a letter to everybody. I need 65 year old women who have a certain asset base, and you have these these particular hotties, that's who I That's my target market for a financial advisor. And you can see the car dealers and the other people, the bankers and all around the tables, totally getting it. So that speaking that language was much better. And, you know, they readily invested in having us do analytics.
I love that you decide to write this book that just steps into what everybody's thinking under the surface. I mean, especially as you move up in leadership, you realize that this is at every level, he just may not see that level of transparency, depending on the relationship. But the more you know, people, the more you realize, man, everybody's trying to figure stuff out at every level. So would you talk to us about why you decided to write this book, and then give us some, you know, some tidbits of what to expect?
Well, part of part of the selfishly The reason I wrote it was people had asked me what I did, and in 2000 So in 2003, I became a Franklin Covey, certified executive coach, so 1718 years ago. And from then I spent over a decade trying to figure out how to be like, how to explain what I do. And I you know, people say, what do you do on an executive coach? And they say, okay, and then you'd see them go back to their meal, and this quizzical look on their face, like, what do you do? So, so part of it is that I'm just not, I'm good at helping other people get their messaging straight. But sometimes it takes me 15 years to get my head straight. So the surprising gift a doubt was about, it started out with how do I work with clients? Or how do I work with people? And then it stepped, then I realized this is too specific. Where are they on their journey when they get there? One of the things that has been consistently surprising to people I work with and speak to, is what you were saying, John, doubt is, is a actually, it's doubt can mean that we're broken. But it can also just mean that we're on a journey. And then and I like to say that doesn't mean that you're broken. But it could also mean that you're on the verge of greatness. Because it could be pushing you to reconsider the things that you've accepted as the norm. But we don't have that kind of development or leadership. And so that's where coaching consulting and having outside experts can be really helpful. Because we're Jamie Smith, when she was head of ynpn. Said to once told me this and it just fit she said for early careers, we get graded, or reviewed on how tactical we are. Do we solve tactical problems? And that feeds into the schooling that we've had where we've we get graded for the you know, answering the right questions or answering the questions correctly and no, she said when we move up into managers, we have to learn people skills. We realize that just being tactically good isn't enough, we have to actually get along with people. But then when you move into senior leadership, that doesn't do it either because any CEO who's tried to help somebody tactically solve their, their their positional problem knows that they're considered micro managers. I worked with one CEO, who is a sound engineer great sound abilities, his engineers do not appreciate when he would go in and say, maybe these are the problems, he thought he was being helpful by saying, I'm not just observing a problem, but I'm also seeing some of the causes, but it came across as micromanaging. So the senior level is where we need to, it's the higher we get up, the more doubt there is, because there's less certain, there's less certainty, we don't know what's going to happen in the next couple of years. We don't know what's gonna happen the next week. And we don't know that our peers are dealing with that. I got to do a panel here in Greenville for their state association with all new executive directors that were three to five years into their position. And it was so fun, we packed out this breakout room, people wanted to hear the story. And I thought at the end of it, people then and the leaders are awesome. When they're asked, they'll just drop the masks when it's a safe space. And they'll they'll share. So there had they had, we had an hour of great talking about how to, you know, the struggles the wrestling had the pressure of meeting payroll on a regular basis. And then at the end, I thought I'd do a softball question like you do just to have everybody feeling good on the leaf. So I looked at them and said, so Okay, you've been in this three to five years. At what point? Did you start sleeping through the night?
Most of the leaders I know, don't they, they get their mind kind of activates at like two in the morning. And they start, but at a time when they can't do anything about the stuff that's activating, right? It just freaks out. And they looked at each other. And there's this awkward pause, and they said, you can hear them on the mic saying, Do you sleep through the night yet? Do you sleep through the night yet? And the whole, like, the 100 plus people in the room just went Oh, no, that's what I'm getting into. Because we look at the leaders and they project confidence because that's, that's appropriate. But we don't see the safe spaces that they've created. If there are any coaching peers, I like peers, Peer Associations, where you could just talk to another person and you're at your level, and just get real, because we need to know that doubt is normal. And it's not something to be ashamed of. Just like so much of life, when you think the darkest secret when you shine light on it, it's not that scary. But it is to you when you're trying to hide it. And, and that's where we get really bad leaders. They're trying to hide their, their, their doubt, their vulnerability. And it's we I had one leader in Denver, say I can't be vulnerable, like, you know, Brene Brown, she said, she said that LA Brene Brown and all that. But it's I have 100 people that are waiting for their job there. They want to know that they're gonna have a job tomorrow. And if I'm vulnerable and uncertain in front of them, that's going to set the wrong message. And so that it's an interesting I think Brene talks about to about how to have the right aren't you have to have armor at the right time and share it at the right time. So, but yeah, have being vulnerable, makes you a lot safer.
And I feel like it makes you more human. And I am loving the the irony that we work so hard on sleep, training our children so that they will sleep through the night. And here we are as adults, and we cannot wind ourselves down and sleep train ourselves to sleep through the night. And we know that if we did mental health would increase, you know, our calmness and our peace and our serenity would be easier to find. So I just want to thank you, Mark, because I confess, I have never thought about doubt one time in my career. But as you're talking about this, I am pulling in story after story in my career of when it happened to me and I and I think the beauty of doubt is the challenge that it creates, you can either doubt can do two things to you it can create this imposter syndrome. And you have I'm not right that I'm not fitting into this box. But it can also be an exploration exercise of why is my gut telling me that this is not right. And I agree with you. I just think there's so much potential in doing that self work right there and understanding why you feel that way. And I just want to say lastly, age. I just think in this day and age in the way that we're talking about building vibrant cultures. People want to see their leaders as human beings. And if you are constantly perpetuating a sense of confidence of ease of everything's okay, that is not going to mirror the feelings of your staff and they're not going to feel like they can come in and feel safe to bring you these challenges. And so open up a little like take a little baby step in there.
Well, I guess maybe for people that don't like the vulnerability, and I get that, so I love Enneagram I talk about that. And surprising gifted that I've used it for over 30 years myself, okay? Your numbers
to your what
7703 Because I get stuff done, and I'm goal centered and all this stuff, but I'm a seven. And so I know I'm a seven because just because of this, I was told by it when we were getting in premarital counseling 27 years ago, my the priests who did our premarital counseling, looked at our personality things and said, Okay, Mark, you are not you celebrate your mistakes. Like if I screwed up, I'll I'll talk, I'll get on your broadcasts and talk about how I messed up. Because I want other people to learn from it. And it's like, wow, that was dumb. I was sick, do look at this. Don't be like me. Yeah, so I had to be careful, because my wife wouldn't necessarily be ready to do that. And threes. If you know, the Enneagram. Three, the being successful is a is the goal. And so looking like you haven't been successful, is a has that moral gravitas of I am a failure? Which so so if you're in that stance, and are some one of the other stances, a great way to start dabbling in empathy is, or, or that kind of being human saying, I don't know, what do you think, when a leader can bring that you just start drawing out of your direct reports? The best answers now? So I'm not sure that's a great question. What do you think
that's a way to build into every leader in your team, because we do think everybody's a leader. And I think the way that you show up is equipping the next generation of leaders, you know, with that, so giving them that space to kind of explore it. So okay, Mark, I know you work a ton, it's just a leadership coach, too. So let me you know, we have a lot of young listeners, and not just on young listeners. But you know, imposter syndrome is real. We do feel that a lot. I mean, just in our day to day, still at 38. You know, how do you coach people through that to really embrace their unique talents, their step into, you know, some of that confidence level? Can you kind of well,
yeah, so Stephen Covey used to talk about a circle of concern and a circle of influence, your circle of concern is all the things you're worried about. Economy, World Politics, everything, the organization culture at your office, the circle of influences what you can actually do something about. And so you can't necessarily for the emerging leaders in particular, it isn't necessarily safe to grow, because they're, I'm a Gen X, or I get dumped on by boomers and World War Two, yeah. And it, it really frustrates me that millennials and z's and others get dumped on by the Xers and the people that raised the kids to live life the way they do, are then frustrated with the results. It's like, if you plant seeds, and you get a plant, it's the seeds you planted.
Your kids are what you make them. We talk about this all the time at our house, man, it's usually when we have a problem, and we're blaming ourselves, so. So
what I would encourage people that are emerging, first of all, there's we're gonna have a lot of millennials and other and younger leaders than for come into leadership. Some studies have shown we need 80,000 leaders in the nonprofit sector a year as boomers retire and expire. But with the emerging leaders, first of all, they're often not given leadership responsibilities, because the people above them don't think they are leadership training, because the people above them don't have it figured out. And they don't know how to train. Yes, keep going in my 20s. I went to people. So one of my one of my things that I've tried to do throughout my life, an example since we've been talking about kids, when we found out we were gonna have kids, we looked at the teenagers, we liked my wife and I, and we interviewed their parents. What did you do? How did you raise the kids? What kind of rhythms did you have at school? What books did you read in the house? What books did you read, I would try to do that in my 20s with people that had careers that I thought I wanted to have. And I freaked out so many people, because they didn't have it together. And they the package that I saw was not the package they were seeing the viewpoint was different from where they were. And so rather than trusting this is where you the pushing through the doubt, rather than trusting that I had insight to see something. They they freaked out. They're like, I can't help you. So a lot of emerging leaders in organizations where the leaders themselves are just trying to make it as they go along. They're making it up as they go along. And they feel like that could be something's wrong with that. So I think it's working in that circle of concern. Like, I've influence I mean, working on your own stuff, building, being true to yourself, having integrity with the commitments you make with yourself. If you tell somebody if you make a goal that you're going to do a certain amount of something, put it on your calendar and don't feel like you're faking it because you're just having just having an appointment with yourself. No, you're keeping integrity with yourself and you're doing the stuff it takes to get the job done. I one time I went with my boss, and she had had a whole bunch of things that I was supposed to be doing. And it was in addition to my full time job And so I took a ledger of legal paper, and I wrote down all the things from the previous year on the left side, and then all the new initiatives on the right side. And I said to her, I felt like I really felt stressed about this, because I felt like, it was the wrong thing. It was a scary ask, but I asked her. So I need your help. Each of these individual tasks in of themselves, I can argue for why they're the top a one priority to do, but it's all the priorities. And I'm not supposed to be here 24 hours a day. And I understand this is my job. This is my job description, whatever. How do I know where to land? If a phone call comes in? Do I finished the grant proposal? Because there's a deadline? And we want the funding? Or do I pick up the phone? Because we want alum to have a live human being? Like, could you help me with some of those. So I tried to go to her with my problem, but having some sort of like, this is the kind of thing I'm looking for. She took the legal pad, leaned back in her chair, and I thought I'm gonna get fired. I didn't, I really, I was so scared. She said, I wish I could do this. After a very long it felt it was finally a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity. She said, I wish I could do this with my my executive, my boss, because you're absolutely right, this is too much for a human to do. And then we worked through so I was having to kind of, I call it I learned in my master's program was called impression management. What are the impressions that you can manage? So so for the emerging leaders, part of it is just getting to know yourself while figuring out if you like the Enneagram. If you like disk, if you like the Palin's ability battery, or Myers Briggs or something, you're not getting so good at it, that you can say the labels, but getting even better, so that you can say the essence of the labels without anybody having to be an expert in any of those systems, and not doing it. So you can confine yourself in a box and say I can't possibly do that, because I'm an introvert. But knowing what it will take to do something, if you're being required to do be on stage for something and you're an introvert, knowing that you're gonna have to buffer some time for charging on either side. And so as you start building in that integrity with yourself at to whatever ability you're able to, people start taking notice. And they start trusting you with more responsibility. But they also start asking, how are you doing this? Because everybody else seems to be running around out of control with the head, you know, heads on fire, but you seem to have something going correctly. How do you do that? So I think that's those are a few tips that I'd give.
I love the way that you really thread story into what you're doing. And I just think you must have such incredible lived experiences. Because we said this before we started I mean, you are one of these forward thinking visionary giants, on whose shoulders that we are for good stands, you have laid an incredible framework and a challenge to the sector to improve and keep getting better and to keep innovating. And I want to know a story from you of a moment of philanthropy that touched you changed your life. What would you offer today,
I was working with a homeless shelter that was afraid to ask for money. There had been an institutional change. And so they're the leader wasn't used to this. They're used to spending budgets, not raising, not creating them, which is fine. But in the middle of a capital campaign, it's problematic. And so there was one donor that I called I was the consultant on it. I called or emailed every week for six months without getting a response. Everything in his past history said that he was good that he was a good candidate for the for the ask. And I felt there's a couple of weeks where I felt like I'm really pushing this he's I'm a firm believer, a donor hasn't said no until they say no. Silence isn't a no sound says just silence. My head doesn't always agree with that. But like I'm firm believer that. Six months later, I find after this weekly follow up of different sorts, sometimes a handwritten note. He picked up the phone, he said his first words out of his mouth were Mark, I am so sorry. Thank you for your persistence. You've been so pleasantly persistent. And that led to a nice donation. Well, and for the fundraisers, listening to this, his next words were even more like an alert, you know, kind of get your your attention. He said, I was in Boston, he said, I'm standing outside of my home in my chateau in France. Can I call you when I get back? Yes, sir. That would be absolutely all. But the I think for me that the philanthropy in the generosity, one of the reasons why that wasn't working for the organization was they wanted to force him into a certain form of touring what they thought was respectful for donors. The donor didn't want to waste their time he just wanted to give and so the pleasant persistence and having that I am so sorry. Thank you for your thank you for not giving up on me from a donor has helped me to remind myself about a lot of the people we work with it there if they're not responding, it's maybe not because they're maybe just that they're not responding. It doesn't mean that they've said anything about us who we are what they think about us. And I think that builds a resiliency that You can use in all sorts of different interactions with employees, with staff, with faculty with, well, the faculty, but with donors as well.
I mean, I feel like everything you've given us today is about building resiliency, because we need a lot of that, you know, in every aspect of this work. Okay, well, Mark, we, you know, start to wrap up all of our conversations trying to get you to narrow to give us one good thing, this could be a life mantra, this could be a hack or a tip, what would be one good thing you would offer our community today,
the one that is coming to mind as a result of this conversation is there's because of the complexity of our world, and the fast pace is happening, I think we'd all agree that it would be great if every decision could have a decision tree, and we could make our choices through them. And it doesn't tend to happen. So knowing our values, our core values, and our organizational values, I think is a key thing that will help us I did a good values inventory when I went through coach training in 2003. And one of the values that triggered or popped up was independence. And that's what I wrote. That's why I love being a major fundraiser. And that's why I won't go into management as a major gift operator, a manager of major fundraisers, because those are some of the most frustrated people I've ever met. They weren't good, they were good at getting the gifts, but they weren't good at managing the getting of the guests. They want it to just be with the donors not be in, you know, have a filter through the donors. So knowing your core values, I did this one group, nonprofit group. And we had we came back from our breakout rooms. And they said that one of the biggest takeaways was many people didn't know their organizational core values. Like they knew what was on the board room wall. But they didn't really know what the lived core values were. So can I share a resource for this? Oh, yeah. Okay. So I have a free values, inventory at Concord leadership group comm slash values, you can get disorder, it's a page and you just in their directions on how to do that. There's, I have found that that helps us make good better decisions faster. So what you were saying Becky, before about, I don't know what's going to happen. You can also say, I don't know what the future holds. But I do know what isn't changing. Because one of the things that leaders need to keep reminding people what isn't changing, especially in a world that everything seems to be changing. We're going to treat people in a certain way. And we're going to strive to be this type, do this with our mission. These are some things we're going to hold to, and that will anchor the people of all different, very stripes and very, you know, variations of outlooks on the world will anchor to oh yeah, that's why I came to this nonprofit. I wanted to do this good in the world.
Gosh, that recentering is so powerful right now, right, John?
And one an awesome resource. I mean, we'll drop that link in the episode description. So be easy to click and follow over. But okay, Mark, how can people find you point us to where all your books are? Because we need to start at the beginning.
Please go to your local bookstore and ask, Do you have any books by Mark Pippin, but if you can't, I also am on Amazon. I was telling you all before before we get on the air that I tried to make myself findable on Google. So if you Google Mark Pittman mark of the sea Pittman with 20 The one that has Concord leadership group with their title or executive coach would probably be me especially the bow tie even my business cards or bow tie shaped. So Twitter mark a Pitman, LinkedIn I'm active on and definitely email Mark MRC at Concord leadership group.com. And I love interacting and helping people on ways that I can, oh, the nonprofit Academy comm would be another way I guess,
this has been such an enriching conversation. And it is, it is a conversation that is so baked into the now I think it's so relevant for the moment that we're standing in now as we're kind of coming into the two year mark of this pandemic. And we're starting to kind of find our, our stride we're hitting our stride of what we're going to start pointing to and I think baking in these leadership concepts and, and feeling okay, when things are not perfect. And embracing that vulnerability is such a great challenge. So Mark, thank you so much for coming and joining us making us laugh and just being such a delightful and aspirational mentor for our sector. We just really appreciate it.
Thank you so much for having me. This has been a blast. I'm sure had a great time. Thank you.
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