Outside the palace, the Ten Plagues rage. Pharaoh’s advisors urge him to compromise and send out just the men. Pharaoh agrees and makes the offer.

But Moses answers: “With our youth and with our elders we will go. With our sons and with our daughters, with our flocks and with our herds, for it is a pilgrimage of God to us.”

Pharaoh scoffs. He can’t believe his generous offer is being rejected. He can’t fathom what it means to value every member of a community.

One of the central messages of Passover is that every single person matters. We all have a role to play. We all are part of the community. Young and old,  wise and wicked, simple and unsure, we all have to consider ourselves as if we personally came out of Egypt. Unlike with some sacrifices that are eaten only by the priestly class, every community member is to be nourished by the korban Pesah (Passover offering), just as in every generation we share the dangers, and the promise of rescue, that we sing about during the Seder. 

Getting the Jewish community out of Egypt is one thing; getting the Egypt out of the Jewish community is another. How deeply have we in the Jewish nonprofit sector internalized Moses’ message that everyone counts? How much “Pharaoh mentality” still remains in our field’s decision-making?

What would it look like if we valued people not like Pharaoh, but like Moses? Would we be more invested in things like onboarding, intensive professional development, and psychological safety? Would our compensation philosophies change? Would our approach to time and workload management evolve?

Recently, Prof. Joshua Margolis of Harvard Business School and I co-authored an article arguing that the Jewish nonprofit sector needs a mindset shift in how we think about talent. We need to stop thinking about talent as a cost and start thinking about it as an investment, we argued.

Creating actionable, tractable answers to these questions is not easy, and we are imperfect leaders of imperfect organizations during a hard time. The past year and a half have been a tremendously difficult and painful time for the Jewish people, and for all people, Jewish and otherwise, who work, lead, and serve in the Jewish communal field. 

But like Moses, facing off against Pharaoh with audacity, our job is not to despair in the face of obstacles, but to demand miracles — and work toward them.

May the Passover holiday bring a sense of rest from our labors, and a sense of hope against darkness and despair. As our community faces war, antisemitism, and increasing societal upheavals and divisions, let’s remember that it was at “about midnight” when the Exodus truly began. As we prepare this year for the hope and the respite that the Passover season may bring, let’s all recommit to valuing one another like Moses. Let’s recommit to investing in each other like partners in a shared covenant.

One of the central messages of Passover is that every single person matters. How deeply have we in the Jewish nonprofit sector internalized Moses’ message that everyone counts? And how much “Pharaoh mentality” still remains in our field’s decision-making? As we prepare this year for the hope and the respite that the Passover season may bring, let’s all recommit to valuing one another like Moses.

The Pharaoh Mindset: Passover 5785

For so many of us right now, we need an escape. An escape from the news, from the problems and dangers of the world. An escape from our emotions, from our losses, from our fears. Perhaps even an escape from ourselves…

Luckily, Purim is coming, and with it, the chance to become someone new.

Wearing costumes is one of the most distinctive elements of Purim. Lots of holidays have feasts; lots of holidays have alcohol (four cups of wine at Passover, anyone?). But showing up to a prayer service at synagogue to pray while dressed like Taylor Swift, or a unicorn, or Raygun from the Paris Olympics? Only on Purim.

Here, in gratuitous cuteness, is my son Gavi last Purim, dressed as a chicken.

Kids are expert costume-wearers. Look at Gavi’s face: There’s no self-consciousness, no ironic detachment; he’s just there, in the moment. “Yeah, of course I’m a chicken — What are you? What will we be next?”

Did you know that the tradition of dressing up in masks and costumes at Purim is not original to the holiday? Sure, celebration in general goes back to the Book of Esther. The Megillah mentions “feasting and joy” (“mishteh vesimha”), “sending portions [of food]” (“mishloah manot”), and “gifts to the poor” (“matanot laevyonim”). But look at the text — there’s nothing there about costumes. 

In fact, the earliest textual evidence for dressing up on Purim is in rabbinic texts from the 14th Century. Some scholars speculate that dressing up on Purim may have originally developed as a tradition European Jews borrowed from their Christian neighbors, who would dress up for the carnival season in advance of Lent around the same time of year. According to this theory, the cultural borrowing happened first, organically, and all the elaborate rabbinic ideas about connections between masking/costumes and the ideas of Purim  — costumes as a reference to Esther hiding her Jewish identity at first; masks hiding the face as a reference to “Esther” sounding like “hester panim,” “hiding the face [of God],” in connection with the megillah’s lack of explicit reference to God and the idea of hidden miracles; and the connection between hiding identities behind costumes and “venahafoch hu,” “and it [the calamity] was overturned”, i.e., the idea of good possibilities hiding behind bad facts — all these connections between dressing up and Purim theology, beautiful though they are, were all developed later, as explanations (excuses, even?) after the fact. 

Yet, if this theory is correct, then I think the practice of dressing up on Purim becomes more appropriate, not less so. It embodies its own symbolic meaning in its history. Just as the megillah relates events that appeared random on the surface, but turned out to be masking a miraculous deliverance, dressing up for Purim is a practice that “randomly” developed and appeared on the surface to be a simple borrowing from the majority culture, but turned out to be masking deep and vital connections to Judaism. 

In this difficult year, I’m thinking about dressing up on Purim as a way to escape from limitations. For everyone, but especially for leaders, I wonder what would happen if just for one day we stepped outside our assumptions, our habits, our biases, our ideas, or even our identities? What if we tried looking at ourselves, and the world in both its beauty and ugliness, through the eyes of new “masks”? What if we looked around and saw the people and institutions around us as containing new possibilities we’d never considered before?

It’s not an easy time to think like that.

Little Ariel Bibas, of blessed memory, loved Batman. My heart, and the heart of the whole Jewish people, breaks that he isn’t here to dress up for Purim as Batman — and that his brother, his mother, so many other uprooted lives, aren’t here to celebrate Purim in 2025.

That grief deserves its space. And we could spend a lifetime mourning what has been lost. 

And yet, we must keep living, keep looking for hope. We must escape into light, into joy, into good, into new ways of thinking about how not to desist from the work in front of us.

The Purim story threatened genocide, but delivered reprieve. And even now, the world may yet surprise us with hidden possibilities. 

Great leaders don’t deny the realities around them. They channel their agency to respond to events they cannot control in new and creative ways. They step beyond their limitations, trying on new approaches or even new ways of being — with a child-like curiosity and sense of possibility, even about difficult things. 

What are you dressing up as for Purim this year? I hope to be like Gavi, trying on a new self with no self-consciousness, looking out toward the horizon with new eyes, and seeing, perhaps, new wonders in this world.

For so many of us right now, we need an escape. An escape from the news, from the problems and dangers of the world. An escape from our emotions, from our losses, from our fears. Perhaps even an escape from ourselves… Luckily, Purim is coming, and with it, the chance to become someone new.

Masks, Costumes, and Possibilities in Disguise: Purim 5785

Writing in eJewish Philanthropy, Prof. Joshua D. Margolis (Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School) and Gali Cooks (President & CEO, Leading Edge) call for a transformational change to how we approach talent, a new commitment to investing more than ever in the sector's people, ultimately strengthening the entire Jewish communal ecosystem for generations to come.

The Jewish nonprofit sector needs a shift from viewing talent as a cost to talent as an investment. A cost is treated as a negative, something to be minimized; an investment is a positive, something with growth potential that can appreciate in value over time.

They note that the talent cost mindset is rooted deeply in the nonprofit sector, as noted perhaps most famously by Dan Pallotta in his acclaimed 2013 TED talk.

That framing can easily lead decision-makers and donors astray into becoming pennywise and pound-foolish… The mindset that seeks to minimize ‘overhead’ costs can lead to underinvestment in talent, ultimately undermining the charity’s effectiveness. After all, the Jewish nonprofit sector is a service industry. In a service industry, the people are the product.

Joshua Margolis & Gali Cooks. Do we treat talent like a cost (negative), or an investment (positive)?

A Talent Investment Mindset: The Next Frontier for Jewish Communal Innovation

One week from today will be a full year since October 7th, 2023. And later this week, we will begin the High Holiday season with Rosh Hashanah and enter a new Jewish year. There is so much one could say about the year that has passed, the year to come, and the prospect of trying to celebrate the holidays in the long shadow of such horrors.

I want to call your attention to a simple fact: Life can encounter us alone and can encounter us together. We are each individuals, and we are all a collective.

In the shadow of Oct 7th, we are a collective. In the post-October 7th world, the global Jewish community has pulled together in a way we haven’t seen in decades. There has been an enormous sense of collective mourning, of a collective fate and future, not to mention a collective experience of rising antisemitism. There has been new interest in Jewish connections and Jewish learning. 

To some degree, there has also been a sense of collective action — but on the level of action, there have also been painful divisions. And that brings us to the other side of the scale: 

In the shadow of Oct 7th, we are individuals. In the weeks and months following October 7th, I spoke with countless Jewish communal leaders about how their teams and organizations were faring as the crisis unfolded. One theme arose again and again: Different people in the field were having very different experiences. Some people were intensely connected to Israel and emotionally involved. Others were less connected both socially and emotionally. Some organizations had work that was directly connected to responding to needs that came from the attacks, while others were trying to meet their team’s emotional needs while continuing their work not directly connected to Israel or antisemitism. 

Meanwhile, painful divisions arose across ideologies and (to some extent) generations, around views of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These divisions inflamed preexisting polarization that has worsened in North America over the past half decade, from which the Jewish nonprofit sector has not been exempt.

It is tempting to ignore, or even to decry, one side or the other of this truth — to put down our individuality for the sake of the collective, or shun the collective because of our individual differences. But either one would be a mistake. We have to hold both sides of the tension — we have to be individuals in a collective, e pluribus unum.

How do we hold both sides? How do we honor our individuality and our collectivity at once?

The answer is relationships. At a time of “personal brands” and the gig economy, of rising reliance on robots for human thinking and human work, of a literal epidemic of loneliness and isolation, of division, of hatred and war, we need to double down on human relationships. Relationships are how we build culture, how we bridge differences, and how we reconcile our individual and collective natures. Relationships are the work.

Interestingly, Judaism is full of “relationship technologies,” from traditional transportation restrictions on Shabbat causing some communities to be physically close-knit to the idea of a minyan (prayer quorum) bringing people together, and more. Recently, at a Leading Edge alumni forum focused on shared leadership, Joshua Foer noted how powerful the traditional Jewish practice of ḥavruta can be. Ḥavruta is paired learning in traditional Jewish text study, based on the idea that two will learn far more deeply than one, because “iron sharpens iron.” Ḥavruta teaches us to challenge each other supportively, to oppose each other collaboratively, to argue with each other in good faith and while extending each other the benefit of the doubt. It is a remarkable technology for creating fruitful intellectual partnerships. (I met my wife at Pardes, when we were assigned to one another as ḥavruta partners. Ḥavruta technology is powerful indeed.) 

The Jewish Fall Holidays are another “relationship technology,” a powerful bridge of these two sides of human nature.

On the Fall Holidays, we are individuals. The High Holiday liturgy is full of personal development, personal repentance, personal relationships with God, and the divine judgment of individuals. There is an individual obligation to eat in the sukkah, and to wave a set of four species that we individually own. During the Hallel recitation of Psalms, we sing, “ki ani avdekha,” “for I am [singular] Your servant”. As we celebrate Simḥat Torah and restart the cycle of annual Torah reading, we remember that there is an individual obligation to study Torah. 

But on the Fall Holidays, we are also a collective. On Rosh Hashanah we celebrate the “birthday of the world” and the creation of all humanity. In Yom Kippur’s “vidui” confession, we sing “ashamnu, bagadnu” (“we have trespassed, we have betrayed”) in the plural, not the singular. We sing “ki anu amekha,” “for we are [plural] your nation”. In synagogue and in the Sukkah we come together physically with others. When we shake the four species, in part that symbolizes bringing together different kinds of people. We may have an individual obligation to study Torah, but Simḥat Torah and the annual cycle gives us a communal calendar to make it a shared enterprise.

As we come together to commemorate a year since October 7th and to take the High Holiday journey together, let’s do so in the spirit of relationship — the spirit of holding fast to our individuality and to our shared community. Let’s hold the hostages, the injured, the mourners, the displaced, the IDF soldiers, and those still in harm’s way centrally in our hearts, minds, and prayers. Let’s hold also the innocent people in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere who are tragically being killed, injured, and displaced by a war they never asked Hamas and Hezbollah to start. Let’s think of those throughout the world who are suffering, whether in Sudan, Armenia, Ukraine, or anywhere else. 

And when we differ, as we must, in how we think and feel about all these terrible things, let’s think of the shared heartbeat of compassion that animates us all across our differences. Let’s not give up on each other — as individuals, or as members of a shared community. Let’s work on not just giving each other the benefit of the doubt but also giving each other partnership, respect, and trust.

May the hostages return immediately home. May safety, peace, and healing come to Israel and the whole Middle East more swiftly than now seems possible. 

May all of us together, and may each of us uniquely, be written and sealed in the book of life. And may we never again know a year like this one has been.

As we come together to commemorate a year since October 7th and to take the High Holiday journey together, let’s do so in the spirit of relationship — the spirit of holding fast to our individuality and to our shared community.

Alone and Together — The High Holidays in the Shadow of October 7th

I love counting the Omer. It’s weird, it’s archaic, it’s logistically unnecessary, and I relish it every year.

For the uninitiated, “counting the Omer” is a Jewish ritual of the current season. Beginning on the second night of Passover, every night we count (out loud) the days and weeks as they elapse, until we have counted 49 days, a.k.a., seven weeks. The following night, the holiday of Shavuot (celebrating the giving of the Torah) begins.

I love counting the Omer because I love small steps, incremental changes, seeding small habits, and watching them grow over time into big change. Like many people, my wife Keren and I have often used the Omer as an opportunity for self-improvement. One year, we meditated for a few minutes each day along with the Omer count. Another year, we used those seven weeks to start a “Whole 30”-style clean eating regime. Of course, that was before we had two kids under age five. Nowadays, if we manage to remember to count at all, it's usually after the kids are asleep and we've done the requisite clean up. Still, in theory if not always in practice, I appreciate counting the Omer!

As the pace of technological change accelerates, the Omer might also take on a new meaning: a beacon of insistent humanity.

For all the upheavals in the social, political, and geopolitical realms, the story of the past decade has also been shaped by enormous technological change. Newer technologies, such as AI, coupled with even more (now) familiar technologies like Zoom, Slack, and social media have been consequential. The early-2010s-style optimism about social media as a spreader of democracy has given way to widespread concerns about what various technologies are doing to our attention, and to our mental health. Both at work and at home, the rise of “dopamine culture” has led many thinkers to see that not only our work but also our minds are being changed. The pace and constant stimulation created by this technological environment can feel overwhelming for many people — including leaders (and including myself). A recent Chronicle of Philanthropy survey found that 58% of nonprofit CEOs struggle with work-life balance.

In that context, the Omer can serve as an important anchor.

The Omer is a holdover against a technology of automation. The Jewish calendar was originally a highly human affair, with no pre-planned number of days in each month. Yes, for most holidays the Torah lays out a specific day of the month on which the holidays begin, but the months themselves had no fixed starting dates; a new month only began when credible witnesses reported seeing a new moon to the court in Jerusalem. As soon as that happened, messengers rode away to carry the news of the new month to Jewish communities near and far. (The transit time for those messages account for why some holidays are just one day in Israel and two days in the Diaspora.)

Eventually, however, the calendar became “automated” — not by digital tools, but by accurate astronomical/mathematical calculations. It became possible to “fix” the future Jewish calendar not just for the coming Jewish month but the coming Jewish millennium — literally. Hebcal (an online Hebrew calendar tool) can tell you that one thousand years from now, in the Gregorian year 3024, Shavuot will fall on Sunday and Monday, June 6 and 7. The date is no less certain on the Hebrew calendar; Shavuot is the one biblical holiday for which the Torah does not explicitly specify a day of the Hebrew month on which it falls, but still, there is no uncertainty. Since it is 50 days after the beginning of Passover, Shavuot will always fall on the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Sivan. All that is to say: Technically, we don’t need to count the Omer. The future count is known. It is automated. It’s already done.

And yet, we count the Omer anyway. Stubbornly, personally, primitively — we count.

The Torah hints at why. In the verse that establishes counting the Omer (Leviticus 23:15), God commands, “Usfartem lakhem… / And you shall count for yourselves…”. We don’t count because the technical needs of Shavuot demand it. We count the Omer for ourselves. By counting, we are somehow served; we benefit.

In a world of automation, the Omer is a technology of defiant, artisanal inefficiency. And, in a world of distraction, the Omer is a technology of attention. It adds a moment of reflection and attention to the passing of each day. The days always seem to fly by; at this time of year, each day is, at least for a moment, acknowledged and (literally) accounted for.

Don’t, please, mistake my message as opposing technology. Every day I wear eyeglasses that allow me to see where my ancestors would have just bumped into things. Technology is fantastic! Innovation is good. Efficiency is marvelous. AI, like other technologies, may yet deliver us many phenomenal benefits.

But innovation and efficiency are not everything; they are not the sum or summit of goodness. And whenever we make huge changes — to our workflows and worlds, cultures and habits — we should remember to ask questions of what losses might accompany our gains. We should be curious and cautious, even as we don’t shrink from exploring new possibilities. Perhaps we should even make a point — even if just for part of the year (the Omer) or part of the week (Shabbat) — to carve out windows of non-stimulation. Perhaps we should shelter some archaic little holdovers of the analog, small islands in the rising technological stream, to remind us that these new paradigms are contingent choices and not eternal necessities.

Leadership, culture, relationships — not to mention love, trust, family, community, connection, and spirituality — these things cannot be automated. Yet they also can’t be assumed, neglected, or taken for granted. We need to tend them all, with duties and delights that the robots can’t do for us, whatever else (and it is much) they may soon do.

Painfully, this year, the count of the Omer isn’t the only count of days that the Jewish world is undertaking. The 49th day of the Omer this year will also be the 248th day since October 7th, 2023 — marking 35 weeks and three days since the brutal murder of 1,200 Israelis and the capture of hundreds of innocent hostages. We pray for the swift release of the hostages still in unimaginable captivity, for an end to the conflict, and for a sustainable peace and security for Israel, the Palestinian people, and the region.

May your Shavuot be meaningful; may our wounded world be healed; and may all of us always remember that our days inherently count.

In a world of automation, the Omer is a technology of defiant, artisanal inefficiency. And, in a world of distraction, the Omer is a technology of attention.

Unaccountable Counting: Shavuot 2024

The Hebrew calendar is an ellipse that revolves around the Fall Holidays and then the journey from Passover to Shavuot in Spring. As we approach the springtime axis of the Jewish year, we are still reeling from the new world that exploded into our lives at the last axis of the calendar on a nightmarish festival day in Fall. In many ways, that terrible event continues; I write these words only a few days after the intense escalation of Iran’s aerial attack on Israel.

There is a sense that this time we’re living through isn’t like most other times we can remember. Indeed, this is a time of extreme fluidity, rapid change, and contingency — a time of both peril and possibility.

Political scientists and historical sociologists have written about “critical junctures” — pivotal moments where decisions and events significantly shape the future. We hear this and wonder, “Don’t our actions always affect the future?” The answer is yes — but not to the same extent at every moment. As Paul Pierson explains, “Junctures are ‘critical’ because they place institutional arrangements on paths or trajectories, which are then very difficult to alter.” A “critical juncture” today causes “path dependence” tomorrow.

These key moments are frequent for individuals (a graduation, becoming a parent, a new job, etc.). On a large scale, critical junctures are far less common and have historical implications. Most of the time, societies and big institutions roll along the groove that was cut by the last critical juncture — until faced with a new one. That happens when, in Hillel David Soifer’s terms, “permissive conditions” align with “productive conditions.” In other words, key constraints go away, and something happens that changes everything in a lasting way. To give an example: Long before Martin Luther, various people had called for reforms to the Catholic Church. But the invention of the printing press was a “permissive condition” that allowed the “productive condition” of Luther’s ideas to spread quickly and create massive changes not just to religious history but also to geopolitics, the nature of the state, and more.

The Passover story is the ultimate “critical juncture.” The Israelites lived in the seemingly intractable path of slavery in Egypt. God intervened in history, overcoming constraints up to and including the laws of nature with signs, wonders, plagues, miracles — that’s “permissive conditions.” At the same time, God mentored Yokheved, Miriam, Moshe, Aharon, Naḥshon, and others into taking advantage of opportunities to upend the social order — that’s “productive conditions.”

As Jews prepare to tell that story at our Seder tables, the Jewish community is now at another critical juncture. So much is now in flux: the war in Israel; security and antisemitism worldwide; the changing nature of work; the whiplash of AI technology; the climate crisis; the state of democracy… For good and for ill, much that was calcified has become flexible, creating “permissive conditions” both dark and bright. The “productive conditions” will depend, in part, on what we do about it. Jewish leadership has the opportunity to think big together about the future of the Jewish community as a community. 

What kind of leadership does this critical juncture call us to provide? 

First, we need leadership from the top, bottom, and middle — all at once. At a critical juncture, we need everyone to open themselves up to lead and be led. When the Mishkan (Tabernacle) was being built in the desert by newly liberated Israelites, everyone in the community brought what their heart moved them to bring. That’s bottom-up leadership. Simultaneously, throughout the Exodus, Moshe provided strong leadership from the top. Importantly, that leadership was (in the words of the Book of Numbers later) “exceedingly humble”; the greatest leaders provide vision and direction but also empower those they lead. Perhaps the most underrated kind of leadership is leadership from the middle. Just before the Exodus story reaches its denouement with the giving of the Torah, Yitro observes Moshe’s judicial procedures and advises him to empower some middle managers (that is, to create multiple layers of leadership). Middle managers are the glue that holds our institutions together. With so much in flux, we need people in all roles in the Jewish community to step up and lead, listen, and follow.

Second, we need the leadership of creativity. It’s easy to be trapped in the status quo, locked into mental models of the structures and institutions of the Jewish community that come from ”what was” and “what is.” We need to imagine the many ways that it might yet be. Futurist Ari Wallach advises us all to “longpath” (he has coined this as a verb) and become good ancestors for our descendants. Wallach reminds us that there is not just one “the future” but rather many futures. The more futures we can imagine, the more we can see the possibilities offered by a critical juncture.

Finally, we need the leadership of unity — but not uniformity. We’re all in this together. Between plagues, Pharaoh asks Moshe who needs to be released and asks if it can just be the men. But Moshe insists that it will be everyone — regardless of age or gender, every last person in the community, and even the animals — “not a hoof may remain behind.” This ethic of unity and solidarity includes everyone and recruits everyone to participate and contribute. God does miracles but also asks humans to participate in their own miracle-making. The entire people is called to bring the Passover offering, to mark their doorposts in a public display that implies, “I belong to the people of Israel; I am a part of this revolution.” And yet, the story also makes clear that this belonging didn’t mean being a monolith; the community was “a mixed multitude”.

Now, when so many disagreements and pressures are trying to drive the Jewish community apart, is the time for radical empathy, humility, openness, and willingness to remain together across differences to ensure this critical juncture enables us to go from strength to strength. I am mindful of Rabbi Ethan Tucker’s wise teaching that balancing pluralism, integrity, and community is enormously difficult, and cannot be done without painful trade-offs. But this is the work. Our creativity and participatory leadership must take us toward this vision.

So here we are — at a critical juncture, and at the Passover season. People in futures we can’t even imagine depend on what we do at this time, just as we’re here because of our ancestors in Egypt. If Shifra and Puah hadn’t disobeyed orders… If Yokheved hadn’t put baby Moshe in that basket… If Moshe hadn’t been curious about a burning bush… If our ancestors hadn’t been willing to join the Passover project in such a vulnerable way by marking their doorposts… 

What will our descendants marvel at about the choices we make this year?

May this Passover bring us all rest and reflection, courage and creativity, unity and humility. Ḥag kasher vesameaḥ.

Passover 2024: A Critical Juncture for the Jewish World

Concern over Jewish leadership continuity is as old as the Bible, and yet every generation feels the problem differently. Today, fewer young Jews are choosing to work in Jewish spaces, which will eventually result in a smaller pool of potential leaders. Joining this week's episode of  Identity/Crisis is Gali Cooks, founding president and CEO of Leading Edge, a nonprofit that helps Jewish organizations improve their workplace cultures. Together, Yehuda Kurtzer and Gali Cooks explore how to make Jewish organizations not just thoughtful contributors to Jewish life, but also compelling places to work, ensuring that both those who benefit from Jewish spaces and those who work to maintain those spaces continue to stay engaged.

Gali was a guest on “Identity/Crisis,” a podcast hosted by Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute.

The Jewish Leadership Pipeline Problem: Gali Cooks on the “Identity/Crisis” Podcast

Writing in Stanford Social Innovation Review, Leading Edge President & CEO Gali Cooks and Chief Strategy Officer Amy Born explain how biting weasels explain the relationship between salaries and employee engagement. Here is an excerpt:

Every year, when Leading Edge releases our annual Employee Experience Survey, we tend to emphasize findings from the survey that most strongly contribute to employee engagement. “Employee engagement” is about feeling proud of the organization, feeling motivated to do great work, wanting to stay with the organization, and being likely to recommend the organization to others…

We can’t count how often people have asked us this question. Don’t people care about salaries? They ask because the nonprofit sector has an unfortunate—and unfortunately accurate—reputation for offering lower salaries than other fields. And salary is intuitively and materially important to people. It affects where we can live, what we can own, how we can educate our children, what we can consume, how much we can give and share with others, and much more. For those in the nonprofit sector, it is also often the clearest way we can understand and measure our value to the organization. Our own survey data shows that salary is, in fact, correlated with employee engagement. So people ask us why we don’t emphasize it more prominently. Don’t salaries matter?

Our answer is: Yes! They are not an “engagement driver,” per se, because other organizational factors do a lot more than salary does to drive employee engagement. Salaries matter, but they are not the most important thing that does.

To understand why, let’s talk about weasels.

Imagine a workplace where everyone comes into the office. (This story is set in 2019.) It's a totally normal office, except that for some mysterious reason, the company has always kept a group of weasels as office pets. The weasels have a special area in the back with their food and nesting materials and they are also free to wander about the office.

It isn't cute. The weasels bite. Unprovoked. Every day! They approach silently and employees have no warning. You're at your desk, lost in your inbox, when suddenly there's a piercing pain in your ankle and one of the weasels is running away before you knew it was there.

Everyone complains about the weasels. Even the senior team acknowledges that ideally the weasels wouldn't be there. But they've always been there, and no one has time to think of a good plan to get rid of them. Some employees can't take it, and they leave. Turnover is high.

One day, at long last, the senior team locates a shelter for weasels and moves them all out. For the first time, the office is weasel-free. The senior team expects big engagement dividends from this. They have been hearing employees ask to ditch the weasels for years. And on the first day Post-Weasel, the staff is ecstatic. “This is so nice!” everyone says to each other. “Best. Day. Ever.” someone posts (in GIF form) on the company Slack. They celebrate by throwing stuffed weasels at each other and laughing with relief. On Day 2, the atmosphere is still festive. The next week is calmer, but people still seem to have an extra spring in their step and an extra heart emoji in their DMs.

By the third week, however, the euphoria is gone. People's moods have sunk back down toward the old status quo. True, there are no more shrieks of “Youch!” every hour or so. People aren’t so resentful or nervous anymore. But they don’t seem more motivated about their work, either. The senior team is perplexed. What went wrong?

A better question than “What went wrong” is: “What didn’t go right?”

The reason that removing the weasels from our fictional office didn’t send engagement through the roof—and why higher salaries and better salary transparency won’t, either—can be explained by psychologist Frederick Herzberg’s “motivation-hygiene theory.” Herzberg divided workplace experiences into two groups:

“Hygiene factors” can’t make you happy, but they can make you miserable. Think of your knees. When your knees are in good health, you don’t walk around thinking, “Wow, my knees are feeling phenomenal today! That makes me so happy!” In fact, when your knees have no problems, you don’t even notice them. But go sprain your knee, and, well … in the worst way, you notice! (As we write this, one of us is on crutches from a minor knee injury, so trust us on this.)

The other group is “motivational factors.” These won’t, in their absence, make you miserable, although the lack of them might leave you feeling sort of blah. But when they’re there, they can light you up, in the best way. When these factors are in place in your job, you become highly engaged: you go above and beyond to do your best work and are eager to recommend your organization to others as a great place to work. The bottom line isn’t just that you do your job, it’s that you do your job well, add value to the organization, and find meaning and fulfillment in your everyday working life.

Salaries—along with healthy knees and a lack of biting weasels—are hygiene factors…

Writing in Stanford Social Innovation Review, Leading Edge President & CEO Gali Cooks and Chief Strategy Officer Amy Born explain how biting weasels explain the relationship between salaries and employee engagement.

In Stanford Social Innovation Review, Leading Edge President & CEO Gali Cooks and Chief Strategy Officer Amy Born explain how biting weasels explain the relationship between salaries and employee engagement.

Don’t Salaries Matter? Of work, weasels, and employee engagement in the nonprofit sector

Don’t Salaries Matter? Of Work, Weasels, and Employee Engagement in the Nonprofit Sector

In the nonprofit world, most of us don’t paint. But we do tell stories, whether in the form of an annual report, an email newsletter, a slide presentation, a fundraising letter, or an article like this one. And whenever we tell stories we make choices about what—and who—is inside the frame.

I want to tell you a story of a framing choice that was and remains formative for me.

In August 2021, Leading Edge (the organization I lead) released The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership: An Ecosystem View. This report presents an 18-month research process into why cisgender men are still a majority of the field’s top leaders, especially among the organizations with the most resources. This is the case even though men are a distinct minority of the field’s workforce; of the more than 11,600  employees of Jewish nonprofits who took the 2021 Leading Edge Employee Experience Survey, just 20% identify as male, while 69% identify as female and 2% identify as nonbinary, genderqueer, or “prefer to self-identify”. We wanted to find out why the sector’s leadership is so imbalanced by gender relative to the sector’s people. Our research eventually found 71 interrelated causes of that gap and identified five of them as “keystones”—causes which, if they were solved, would drive the most progress on the whole group of 71 causes.

Our report focused on those five keystones: what they are, how we determined them, and how they can help our field move forward toward gender equity in leadership. That’s what we wanted to keep inside the frame, because that seemed to us to be the core message that could drive progress in the field. I made that call, because I wanted everyone with power in our field to be able—and willing—to hear it and act on it. This includes leaders, funders, and other influencers in our sector who represent a broad range of viewpoints and backgrounds—including the full religious range from Orthodox to secular and the full ideological range from left to right. In order to maintain that focus on the keystones, we kept the story simple.

Too simple, perhaps. Because my decision erased a slice of the picture. A number of trans and nonbinary friends and colleagues reached out to me to say that they felt hurt by the way the report presented gender as a binary, without discussing the specific and unique experiences of transgender, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people in our community. They felt unseen and unvalued. They asked why we had made these decisions, knowing full well we had engaged 19 trans and nonbinary Jews in a series of listening sessions as part of the research precisely so that we could learn more about how gender—across the spectrum—manifested itself in leadership in the Jewish nonprofit sector.

I regret the decision to leave this outside of the frame. In a world where the simple fact of someone’s identity—being transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer—often gets automatically and unfairly tagged as being polarizing, I had wanted to keep things simple by focusing on the binary—man or woman. But that’s not the world we live in—or the Jewish community we need. The Jewish community needs vibrant, diverse leadership to thrive. Everyone working in our field will benefit from a situation in which every individual is free of the constraints of gender bias and gender barriers. That’s true for transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people, but emphatically also true for cisgender women and men. To achieve that kind of freedom and justice, we must tap into all of our talent and potential. So I want to say now, to anyone who read the report and felt erased, unseen, or unvalued: I am sorry. I let you down, and I will work to do better.

As one very small part of that effort, I want to share some of what we left outside the frame. 

During the course of our research, Leading Edge conducted peer-led listening sessions with groups that we felt had been underrepresented in the workshops, surveys, and interviews that had informed the research thus far. And while we didn’t include these insights in the main body of the report (they are in a methodology appendix, accessible here), they did inform how we crafted the map of causes that informed our network analysis. 

Among them were three peer-led listening sessions for transgender and nonbinary Jews, facilitated in partnership with Keshet. In inviting participants, we worked to include a range of participants, some of whom work in the Jewish nonprofit sector, some of whom have left the sector, and some of whom have not considered working in the sector. We wanted to understand the barriers transgender and nonbinary people perceive within our field that may be keeping them from joining it, thriving in it, or advancing in it. 

The participants in these listening sessions shared numerous insights with us, all of which are outlined in summary here. But I want to call special attention to four of them that particularly spoke to me:

Transphobia—as well as a lack of education around trans issues—is persistent in the Jewish community. 

Camp and youth groups are a huge pipeline for work in the Jewish professional field. If these spaces are not trans-affirming, this pipeline is virtually closed to trans people. 

People make assumptions that if you’re trans, you automatically have a certain political agenda. 

People often assume that it is the job of the marginalized person to “educate” the organization and that can be exhausting. 

These insights are painful and important to consider. Cisgender women are not the only people harmed by the biases, habits, and structures that keep men disproportionately in charge of our institutions. Transgender, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are part of our workforce and part of the constituencies organizations serve. Leaders, boards, funders, and professionals should all be concerned with ensuring that transgender, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary staff members feel fully included and valued at work—and right now, to the field’s detriment, that isn’t always the case—with our own report being, unfortunately, a case in point.

External data echoes and enriches much of what our listening session participants have told us. McKinsey has found, for example, that more than half of transgender employees say they are not comfortable being out at work. Fully two-thirds remain in the closet in professional interactions outside their own companies. Cisgender employees are paid better, even accounting for educational attainment. And employers are less likely to hire and promote trans people.

Of course, gender also intersects with other forms of identity. We also conducted listening sessions with Jews of Color, men (underrepresented among our research participants), Orthodox women, people with disabilities, and women at different stages of their careers. Summaries of all their insights, along with those listed above from transgender and nonbinary people, can be found here.

In this era, we’re all learning together what and whom we often leave out of the frame, the impact of those choices, and trying to do better as time goes on. I appreciate the honest, direct, and kind manner with which friends and colleagues reached out to me to engage in a dialogue about the impact of my framing choices around this report. They demonstrate a combination of honest feedback with kindness and connection, and both sides of that combination are vital to the task of effectively expanding the frames that encompass our community. It isn’t always comfortable or easy to break apart an old frame and construct a new one together, but the picture is always more beautiful, more fair, and more powerful if it includes everyone in the room.

Sometimes I look at famous paintings and wonder what’s just out of frame. Not just the classic question of who the Mona Lisa is smiling at, but what else is on the other side of the room? To paint a picture is to choose: where do you draw the frame? Something is in—and everything else is out.

Beyond the Frame, Beyond the Binary: A Gender Gap, a Report, and an Untold Story

In his 2003 book The 2% Solution, Matthew Miller argued that newspapers should have a front-page feature called “Still True Today.” Instead of focusing only on what’s newest and most sensational, he argued that the media should remind readers of facts that are massively important but decidedly not new. How many people live in poverty, for example? Poverty didn’t show up overnight, but it’s an important problem, and the media shouldn’t create a narrative that what’s new is the only thing that matters.

Since that book was written, newspapers with physical front pages have become mostly obsolete. Yet the idea behind “Still True Today” is itself still true: sometimes “the olds” matter as much as the news.

The importance of “the olds” struck me this year as I dove into the data revealed in Leading Edge’s 2021 Employee Experience Survey. Since Leading Edge fielded the first Employee Experience Survey in 2016, much has changed in our sector, and this year’s report contains many insights about how our field is changing—not only in response to the pandemic, but based on generational changes that long preceded it. For example, our data shows that more than ever before, employees are prioritizing things like well-being and how much they feel they belong when considering how long they want to stay at their organizations. 

But despite these new shifts, many important things have also stayed the same—some of them great! ...And some of them, well... otherwise.

First, the good news (or, rather, the good olds): People in the Jewish nonprofit field are pumped up about their missions. Employees at Jewish organizations are overwhelmingly proud to work at their organizations (90%). They know how their work contributes to their organizations’ missions (90%) and they believe their organizations provide quality services to their communities (91%). They also feel respected by their managers (90%).

These strengths are worth celebrating, and shouldn’t be taken for granted—especially as the rising generations of workers make values and a sense of mission more important than ever for engagement and retention. As Deloitte has written, “To win the hearts of Generation Z, companies and employers will need to highlight their efforts to be good global citizens.” This is something the Jewish nonprofit sector is already doing remarkably well.

Now it’s time for the bad olds. Only a minority of employees (46%) say that their performance review process actually helps them grow and improve. Employees largely feel that their organizations are understaffed, with only a minority (42%) reporting that their organizations have enough people to do the work they need to do. Only a minority feel that their salaries are fair relative to similar roles in their organization (42%) and even fewer (37%) say that they understand how salaries and raises are determined at their organizations. Only 38% of employees feel that they have opportunities for advancement at their organizations. 

None of this is new. But that doesn’t make it unimportant. The opposite is true! The longer these problems hold back the Jewish nonprofit sector from doing its most outstanding work, the more urgent it should seem to leaders, boards, funders, and everyone else in our sector to prioritize these problems. Truly useful feedback; clear ways to advance in a career; feeling properly valued and compensated in a way that is clearly communicated and makes sense—these are fundamentals, not luxuries. Our field can and must improve.

For my own part, I take the persistence of these problems as a gauntlet thrown down. These are areas in which Leading Edge, my organization, needs to create more practical, immediate tools that leaders and managers can bring into their everyday operations at Jewish nonprofits across North America. We also need to do more work to persuade leaders who are drinking from a firehose of competing priorities that putting employee experience first will help them with the rest of their deluge as well.

As I write these words, it is Hanukkah, a festival whose name means “dedication.” As we bask in the light of the menorah this year, and reflect on the truly vital and incredible work that Jewish organizations do every day, let’s rededicate ourselves to supporting employees in our field with effective feedback, professional development opportunities, salary transparency, and everything else they need to thrive. Our institutions are our people; that’s why the importance of supporting them will never get old.

Our Employee Experience Survey shows our sector is changing in many ways. In others… not so much.

Reading the “Oldspaper”: What HASN’T Changed in the Jewish Nonprofit Sector

ZSJNM Culmination Keynote 2021

Gali Cooks delivered the keynote address at the 2021 culmination ceremony for the Zelikow School of Jewish Nonprofit Management at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Gali Cooks, delivered the keynote address at the 2021 culmination ceremony for the Zelikow School of Jewish Nonprofit Management at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Keynote: Details, Integrity, and Relationships

Leading Edge President & CEO Gali Cooks joined nonprofit consultant Joan Garry as a guest on Garry's podcast, “Nonprofits Are Messy,” for a wide-ranging and detailed conversation on what it takes for nonprofit organizations to become leading places to work.

Gali Cooks and Joan Garry: How to Attract, Develop, and Retain Top Nonprofit Talent

Watch Gali Cooks (President & CEO, Leading Edge), Joan Garry (author, Guide to Nonprofit Leadership), and Rabbi Rick Jacobs (President, Union for Reform Judaism) in a provocative conversation on why some organizations barely survived while others thrived — and what comes next. Jodi Rudoren, Editor-in-Chief of the Forward, moderated.

Watch Gali Cooks (President & CEO, Leading Edge), Joan Garry (author, Guide to Nonprofit Leadership), and Rabbi Rick Jacobs (President, Union for Reform Judaism) in a provocative conversation on why some organizations barely survived while others thrived in this crisis— and what comes next. Jodi Rudoren, Editor-in-Chief of the Forward, moderated.

Video—Innovate or Die: A Forward Conversation

Originally published in Stanford Social Innovation Review, September 8, 2020

Each year, the organization I lead administers an employee experience survey to hundreds of Jewish nonprofit organizations. Last year, Leading Edge was finally big enough to receive results from our own survey, as we had grown to a team of six FTEs. The team was excited to fill out the survey that we had designed for our partner organizations. Finally, we could taste our own cooking!

Once all responses were in, I logged onto the platform and excitedly waited for the survey results to load. But as the numbers populated, I grew concerned and then, eventually, discouraged. We performed well on most of the factors that contribute to a great workplace culture—passion for our mission, pride in working at our organization, effective internal communications, and even a high net promoter score—but there was one glaring exception: Nearly half of our staff reported that they felt a lack of psychological safety at work. These employees shared that they did not feel comfortable “providing job-related feedback to [their] colleagues” nor did they feel comfortable “sharing potentially unpopular opinions” at work. In short, some of our team members did not feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work.

Oh wow, I thought. I am such a hypocrite. How is this possible? Our organization’s mission is to help build the leadership pipeline of Jewish nonprofit organizations. And we know that talented professionals want to spend their days in environments that enable them to thrive and that psychological safety—a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for raising issues in the workplace or for making mistakes—is a crucial ingredient of a great workplace. Yet we were falling short on this fundamental indicator of organizational success.

My mind rebelled. This must be wrong. Inclusiveness is a strength of mine. I pride myself on being highly intuitive, making people feel comfortable, and having a positive attitude. I believe in servant leadership, and I go out of my way to be appreciative and kind with my staff. How could some of my team not feel comfortable speaking up, asking for help, and sharing unpopular opinions at work?

I sat down with my coach for a gut check. We reviewed areas where I felt the work my team was doing was going well and where I felt we had room for growth. We then reflected on my role in both categories—the strengths and the growth areas. The process my coach led me through is subjective, but it was clarifying how, as my coach probed, I could quickly point to areas where the team was in sync and cranking and areas where there was more friction.

Through this introspection, I came to realize that what I thought was my strength was in fact holding my team back. In trying to promote a positive culture, I was inhibiting an honest wrestling with ideas, which was hindering innovation and promoting some staff discontent. My staff had become hesitant to share feedback, deliver bad news, or express critical opinions about other people's ideas—even if those ideas would make our work better.

As I went through this reflection process, I came to see that something else was suppressing free expression: high expectations. Leading Edge is a young, fast-growing organization; we feel that we should be a model for other nonprofits. As a result, I set the bar extremely high, which means when the organization makes a mistake, it is difficult to hide our frustration and distress. I realized that this created an atmosphere where bearers of bad news felt they would be subtly punished.

Why The Best Teams Make the Most Mistakes

The results of the survey had stung, but I knew that learning from it would make our team better. After diving into the academic origins of psychological safety, I began to make changes to my management in the hopes of building a workplace that would be both supportive and accountable.

In the late 1990s, Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson was studying high-performing medical teams when she discovered something surprising: The most cohesive hospital teams reported making the most medical errors. When she dug a little deeper, she realized that the better teams weren’t really more accident-prone: They were more able and willing to talk about their mistakes, which of course was key to their high-performance (you can’t learn from a mistake unless you acknowledge it). This insight formed the basis of Edmondson’s influential 1999 paper, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.”

Psychological safety is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,” Edmondson wrote in the study. “It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.” Edmondson’s research has been validated in a variety of settings. When Google, for example, ran a big-data project to understand what drove their most high-performing teams, they found that, more than anything else, psychological safety was critical to making a team work.

Tyrannical managers can inhibit psychological safety with a rigid, “don’t-come-to-me-with-problems, come-to-me-with-solutions” approach, and we have some bullies in the Jewish nonprofit community, to be sure. But because faith-based and ethno-cultural nonprofits often form a tight-knit community, there is often a social price for workplace incivility, and you’re less likely to be a jerk to an employee if you know that you’re going to see them in synagogue on the weekend. What’s more, because the nonprofit sector typically attracts leaders who want to build community, they tend to be educators at heart, with a predisposition for compassion and empathy. But while these qualities are important for fostering psychological safety in teams—after all, how can you bring your whole self to work if you don’t feel your team-leader will be empathetic?—they’re not sufficient.

When it comes to psychological safety, pushovers can be as bad as bullies. In fostering a courteous workplace, a manager can forget the importance of encouraging open discussion and free expression. Our Employee Experience Survey—completed by nearly 20,000 employees at more than 230 Jewish nonprofits over the last four years—found that while almost nine out of 10 respondents felt they were treated with respect by their managers, and that their managers genuinely cared about their well-being, only 60 percent of respondents said they received meaningful feedback on their performance (16 percent below the US benchmark from other similar surveys performed by Culture Amp). What might seem like a contradiction—that respondents liked their managers, but they also reported that their managers weren’t helping them get better at their jobs—makes sense when you realize that what is missing from many nonprofit workplaces isn’t civility but accountability.

At Leading Edge, the problem of my own making was not being in the habit of offering constructive feedback, both positive and negative. Instead of building a feedback muscle, I tried to embody a positive attitude while being intolerant of mistakes, which made it difficult for feedback to occur. The solution, I came to realize, was that we needed to start modeling the behavior we wanted to see: We needed to practice reflecting on mistakes and giving critical feedback.

This is harder than it sounds. Delivering feedback in a way that sticks and leads to a change in behavior is difficult. People aren’t hard-wired to learn from their mistakes, especially when those mistakes have to be pointed out to them. In a recently published paper, Wharton post-doc Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach, a University of Chicago professor, gave study participants a series of extremely difficult trivia questions, each with two possible answers. Half the group then received feedback on what they’d gotten right while the others were corrected on their wrong answers. Follow-up tests revealed that, while participants given success feedback were able to answer those questions correctly again, those given failure feedback learned much less, often nothing at all. Failure feedback undermines learning, the authors found, “because it wounds the ego, which causes people to tune out.”

As this ingenious research suggests, the key to fostering an environment where criticism is welcomed and well-received is to somehow get the ego out of the equation. I see four ways to do this. 

The leader goes first. Ed Catmull, the long-time leader at Pixar, often likes to start group sessions by saying “Here’s the mistake I made.” This encourages reciprocation and takes some of the stigma out of the failure.

Normalize failure by explaining it as a natural part of innovation. Catmull often reminds his staff that “early on, all of our movies suck,” to make the point that the creative process is innately iterative and relies on feedback to improve.

Remove the sting from failure feedback by routinizing it. Delivering and receiving feedback is a muscle and you can make it stronger by working it out. More to the point, when feedback becomes routine, the sting to the ego will begin to dull. Just as gym-goers become habituated to the discomfort of working out, sharing feedback becomes a habit, a normal part of the day.

Get employees to recognize their own mistakes. As one works on the feedback muscle, employees learn to see when they make mistakes and can point out their own way to move forward. By asking reflective questions about a situation (for example: “How do you think that meeting went?”), leaders can help employees review their own performance, rather than having a leader or manager point it out to them. This owning of the process can be powerful and helps get the ego out of the way.

I now try to ask for feedback from my team on a regular basis. When doing so, I try to follow best practices, remembering that feedback is a “gift”: It needs to be received as well as given. According to Harvard Business Review, feedback is most effective when it is shared frequently and in context; it aims to achieve a specific outcome; it is realistic in its expectations; it shows respect for the recipient; it is a two-way conversation; it is expressed as a point of view, rather than an absolute truth; and it assumes an opportunity for follow-up.

I also try to be aware of three complications in fostering psychological safety:

The first is that across sectors, including the Jewish nonprofit sector, research shows that women are generally less comfortable speaking up in the workplace. Women often worry about how they will be perceived, while men tend to be more secure in revealing what is on their minds. When giving personalized feedback to my team, I am mindful of this dynamic, for which the work of Iris Bohnet has been particularly useful. 

The second complication is that there is tremendous variance between how people respond to feedback. Some people love learning from mistakes, others are more resistant, and still others personalize their mistakes to the point of paralysis (as in, “I couldn’t do this right, therefore I can’t do anything right.”). Baggage and scar tissue from previous managers may manifest in unexpected ways. In a previous role, one of my employees balked when I asked for their opinion on a policy decision, as if it was a trap. We will end up doing whatever the boss wants anyway, their thinking ran, So what’s the point of weighing in? In another previous role, one of my employees was so used to being micromanaged that they worried about the trust and affirmation that I gave to them. No one size fits all, so I now try to personalize my approach to each person.

The third complication is that as I write this, the world continues to struggle with the COVID-19 global pandemic, which has upended our lives both at work and at home and introduced enormous detriments to employees’ feelings of psychological safety. The most important drivers of these feelings are things far beyond my control. But the current situation gives me all the more reason to control the things I can and keep my team’s psychological safety at the top of my mind when influencing their working lives during this crisis.

Like any change process, my progress has not been linear. Some weeks it feels like two steps forward and two steps back. Occasionally, I’ll find myself wincing when my team makes a mistake; then I’ll overcorrect and adopt my equally repressive “everything-is-awesome” routine. But again, I try to model the right behavior by reflecting on my mistakes, learning from them (hopefully), and working to improve.

Are my interventions working? I won’t know for sure until we repeat our staff survey next year. That’s the thing about psychological safety: without it, you are flying blind. If psychological safety remains a problem, I’ll be the last person to know, because none of my team will feel confident telling me. I am optimistic though. And if it turns out I still am not getting this right, I will go back to the drawing board and keep at it.

When half of the staff at Leading Edge reported feeling a lack of psychological safety at work, the problem wasn’t bullying but the promotion of a workplace culture that only allowed positivity.

How a Lack of Negative Criticism Can Make NGO Employees Feel Unsafe

Gali Cooks, President & CEO of Leading Edge, discusses Jewish leadership, talent strategy in the Jewish communal workforce, and more with Andrés Spokoiny on Jewish Funders Network's podcast.

Gali Cooks on “What Gives? The Jewish Philanthropy Podcast” | Leading Edge

Gali Cooks on “What Gives? The Jewish Philanthropy Podcast”

Leading Edge is pleased to announce open applications for Cohort Three of the CEO Onboarding Program, a leadership development experience focused on the unique challenges and opportunities of leading in the Jewish organizational world. Participants in this competitive program will enhance their executive skills and strengthen their leadership in the American Jewish community during the critical, initial period at the helm of an organization.

“For great leaders, learning is an ongoing endeavor,” said Leading Edge President and CEO Gali Cooks. “Through this program, we aim to provide CEOs who are early in their tenures with the support, resources, and peer network that will help them develop their leadership further and lead meaningful change in their organizations and the Jewish world more broadly.”

The 15-month-long CEO Onboarding Program is open to CEOs in their first 24 months of leading a Jewish nonprofit. Key components of the program include:

A cohort of approximately 15 peers who support each other through leadership challenges and share expertise, inspiration, and advice as they navigate their organizations through change.

Four in-person convenings, including an opportunity to study at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) and an Israel experience that serves as a leadership laboratory focused on navigating complex conversations.

A facilitated 360-review process, where team members, board members, and colleagues share their reflections on working with the CEO.

Working with an Executive Coach who supports the CEO over the course of the program by helping them further actualize their potential as a leader.

Emphasis on empowering participants to be “chief culture officers” and exploring how to successfully lead organizations that are diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

Opportunities and frameworks for participants to connect their leadership with Jewish Values, hone their leadership voice, and tell their stories.

The application process is open until Thursday, March 28, 2019. Decisions will be announced by June 2019 and the first gathering of Cohort Three will take place in October 2019.

All CEOs who have previously participated in the program indicated that it improved their leadership skills and that having a cohort of fellow CEOs has been crucial to their ability to thrive as leaders.

Leading Edge Opens Applications for CEO Onboarding Program – Cohort Three

It turns out, there is an actual recipe for creating a leader. Start with a heavy dose of dynamic work experience, add a few dashes of mentoring, mix in a pinch of formal training and voila! You have a leader. It’s called the 70-20-10 leadership development model, and it was developed by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) decades ago.

Notice something interesting? A full 70% of this formula hinges upon the cultivation of increasingly challenging, on-the-job “work experiences.” Yet too often this key ingredient is overlooked by managers. After all, it is much easier to simply approve an employee attending a one-off, skill-building course, say, rather than meaningfully support them in leading a new program – a riskier and more time-consuming proposition.

But the latter is exactly what organizations need to do in order to successfully cultivate workplace cultures that enable individuals to develop as leaders. Unfortunately, our sector is falling short in this area.

The President and CEO of Leading Edge uses findings from the Employee Experience Survey to discuss the need for feedback when developing leaders.