As Leading Edge welcomes our newest colleagues, the fantastic team formerly of JPro, I am thinking back to Fall 2008, when I first encountered the history of the organizations that became JPro. 

I was a grad student in NYU’s MPA-MA program in Public & Nonprofit Management and Judaic Studies. (One fellow student: Ilana Aisen, now Chief Community Impact Officer at Leading Edge.) Seeking part-time work, I became a research assistant at the Berman Archive, now at Stanford, then at NYU. (My supervisor: Mordy Walfish, now Leading Edge’s Chief Advancement Officer.) My job was mostly summarizing publications. Today, AI would do it in a fraction of the time! But the state of technology in 2008 helped my Jewish nonprofit education, by exposing me to countless documents from the Jewish nonprofit past — among them, decades of issues of the Journal of Jewish Communal Service. Published under several titles between 1924 and 2013, this was the journal of the succession of organizations that would someday be known as JPro, now part of Leading Edge. (You can still browse this collection.)

Here are three insights I’m reflecting on now from that past experience:

1. Our field has changed a lot in the past century. 

I was struck by the dominance of social work in the journal’s pages. Social work training is still one path into our field, but judging from this journal, early in the 20th Century it appeared to be the path. Partly, this relates to the major issues facing the community at the time — meeting the needs of the 1880-1924 influx of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, an economic, social, and cultural shock that took years (generations) to address. Of course, many of the issues facing the Jewish community of the early 20th Century are still part of our field, from fighting antisemitism to addressing poverty and more. But other concerns, technological possibilities, and changes in the surrounding society that we face in today’s field would strike a Jewish communal worker of the 1920s, or even the 1980s, as alien. 

2. Our field can be like a family — sometimes literally. 

A sense of “family” at work can be good — closeness, trust — or bad — boundaries can break down between the personal and professional. But for me, in that job, the work/family boundary broke down in a surprisingly literal and delightful way. Assigned to me, randomly among multiple research assistants (but guided to me I can only say by Providence), was an article by my own grandfather, Herman Weinheimer, who was executive director of the Jewish Community Service Society of Buffalo. I later discovered that the journal’s archive had two articles by him (1, 2), and an obituary after his untimely passing when my mother was just a baby. He was an amazing man whom I never got to meet; I have only photos, family stories, and documents — including German documents showing his arrest and incarceration at Dachau in 1938; American immigration documents just weeks later, after he luckily received a U.S. visa and the Nazis (at that early date) were willing to let him emigrate; military documents showing his return to Germany with the U.S. Army. My family knew those documents. But of the last, less dramatic chapter of his life — when he was a Jewish communal professional making life a little better for the Buffalo Jewish community — we had no documentation, until finding these articles. The Jewish communal professional field practically reached out and told me it was my heritage even before I joined it.

3. The Jewish communal field’s history should be more celebrated. 

As Leading Edge and JPro unite, I’ve been thinking about the Jewish communal professional identity. It deserves to be stronger. All of us who work in this field (whether Jewish or not) should have a stronger sense that “Jewish communal professional” is an identity (among others) that we embrace and celebrate. Our field is remarkable, and I think one underrated source of pride in our field is its history. The history of Israel advocacy, being still so central, is I think well known enough. But how many Jewish professionals know that it was Jewish Federations that inspired United Way? Or the contributions of all those Jewish social workers to the field of social work as a whole? Do enough people know how influential Jewish philanthropists have been on American affairs of state? Or the saga of the Jewish community’s fight to free Soviet Jewry? Assuredly, for many people in our field the answer is “Yes, of course!” But my sense (anecdotally, not based on data) is that this kind of knowledge and pride could be more widespread.

As Leading Edge, now incorporating JPro and its whole 125+ years of history, works with our partners across the field to explore what the future of the Jewish communal field will look like (and please do join us in May in Baltimore to be part of that conversation!), I hope that our visions for the future will embrace the lessons, legacy, and pride of our shared past.

Top to bottom: Herman Weinheimer, the author's grandfather, excerpt from vol. 1 of The Jewish Social Service Quarterly, published in February, 1925, cover of Journal of Jewish Communal Service Winter/Spring 2011 edition.

In JPro’s predecessors’ journal, Leading Edge's Seth Chalmer found insights into the Jewish communal field’s history and future — plus articles by his grandfather that were new to his family.

What I Learned Reading Decades of Issues of the Journal of Jewish Communal Service

It may seem odd, in reviewing a book, to begin by discussing a hypothetical different book that the authors didn’t write. But in order to illuminate and appreciate one major choice that Dr. Ron Wolfson and Dr. Jason G. Goldman made in crafting their new book on Jewish leadership, I hope you’ll indulge my oddity in doing just that.

If all I knew about a book were that its title was Jewish Communal Leadership, I might expect the book to be structured around things like:

Rules or principles for Jewish leaders to follow

Styles, personality types, or other general archetypes of Jewish leadership

Field-specific categories of Jewish professional leadership (rabbis, school principals, camp directors, JCC heads, Federation chiefs, foundation leaders, etc.)

Within these categories, I might expect that real people and real stories would be used to illustrate these rules, mistakes, styles, or positions. But the primary focus (in the hypothetical book I would expect) would be didactic, while people and stories would be roped in as secondary supports to the primary materials.

If I then learned that the subtitle was “Lessons Learned From Leading Practitioners” (emphasis added), then I would feel confirmed in my suspicions. “This book,” I would think, “must be structured around lessons.” Even if I then learned that the main research process for the book was interviews with ten leaders, I would assume that stories and case studies from these interviews would fill out a book structured mainly around lessons and concepts.

But the reality of this book confounded my expectations — and in a way that may be almost as instructive as the book’s contents.

Jewish Communal Leadership: Lessons Learned From Leading Practitioners is not structured around lessons. It is structured around individual leaders. Each chapter is not a principle, a rule, a style, or any other artificial construct — each chapter is a transcript of a conversation with a leader who is making an impact in the Jewish world.

Here are the ten leaders whose stories and reflections we read:

Barry Finestone [a non-voting member of Leading Edge’s board]

Daryl Messinger [board chair of Leading Edge]

It’s not that these conversations lack things like lessons, rules, principles, mistakes, styles, and information specific to various Jewish sub-fields. Each conversation is rich with both stories and conceptual insights, and my copy of the book now has many colorful book flags sticking out marking quotes and points I found valuable. Indeed, in a recent article promoting the book, Dr. Wolfson himself extracts ten generalized “takeaways” you can read right now. Still, what strikes me most about this book is that these takeaways and abstractions are never stripped of their narrative contexts. Instead, the personal stories and experiences of the interviewed leaders, with all their messiness, take primary focus. 

In choosing the messy and human over the streamlined and polished, and the personal and specific over the general and didactic, Wolfson and Goldman follow in the footsteps of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) itself — another book of “lessons” that enmeshes its legal codes and linear abstractions in a much larger web of complex narratives. The result is far more demanding of the reader than a simple, clean law book would have been — but also much richer and deeper in its potential for transforming the reader and the community. Discussing the Torah’s dual nature as law and story, the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ztz”l wrote:

“Law is one thing, narrative another. Narrative answers the question ‘What happened?’ Law answers the question, ‘How shall I act rightly…?’ Why then does the Torah contain both? The answer goes to the heart of the Judaic enterprise… God wants us to know, not only what to do, but why… God's law is not arbitrary. It speaks to the human condition. It arises out of human history.”

That Jewish Communal Leadership focuses on individual specific leaders’ stories, then, is one layer of wisdom in its structure. But another layer is to present not only the interview subject’s words, but the conversation between the subject and Wolfson. For fans of Wolfson’s prior work — including Relational Judaism and the Relational Judaism Handbook — it should come as no surprise that the give-and-take of two human beings encountering each other receives such a central place in this book.

In that sense, this book’s title should be read as including a knowing wink. Jewish communal leadership (the actual practice, not the book title) can’t fit into a shelf of books, let alone a single volume. It’s something living and changing, which we can only apprehend in the form of breathing, changing people. As the brilliant Dr. Erica Brown says in her chapter:

“I cannot stand to give a talk about leadership… There’s no ‘talk’ about leadership. It’s the people in the room… You are the book; you are the text.”

Books, articles, words on pages can only ever gesture in the direction of the stories, the lives, the people who make Jewish communal leadership a reality. This book is a worthy invitation into that larger and more vital encounter.

In choosing the messy and human over the streamlined and polished, and the personal and specific over the general and didactic, Wolfson and Goldman's new book on Jewish leadership demands more of the reader than a simple, clean law book would have been. But the personal stories and experiences of the interviewed leaders also offer richer and deeper potential for transforming the reader and the community.

Reading Edge: “You Are the Text”: Dr. Ron Wolfson’s “Jewish Communal Leadership”

When did you first begin to feel overwhelmed at work? Reader, your mileage may vary; it’s even possible that your answer is that you don’t, personally, feel overwhelmed at work. In which case, lucky you! But many people do feel as if their working lives are a firehose, a hamster wheel, or, at least, a bit much sometimes. 

For many of us, that sense of fatigue dates back some years — before recent geopolitical upheavals, before the COVID-19 pandemic and the Zoomification of many jobs, and even before the rise of smartphones and social media. Computer scientist and popular author Cal Newport argues that our pervasive sense of burnout  goes further back than that — back to the advent of email. Email made communicating easier. That sounds good, and, in many ways, it is good. But when something gets easier, we do it more. And now, well… We do it a lot.

To review Cal Newport’s A World Without Email (2021) this year, just after Newport released Slow Productivity (2024), is a little like reviewing Taylor Swift’s album Evermore (2020) even as The Tortured Poets Department (2024) only just dropped. The comparison between Cal Newport and Taylor Swift is invoked advisedly; Swift’s global community of fans may be several orders of magnitude larger than Newport’s following, but the latter (shall we call them Newporties?) might well rival the Swifties in passionate devotion. The average Cal Newport reader tends to be positively evangelistic about Newport’s ideas, which help people find not just success, but also sanity, in their work and personal lives, in a technologically complex world. Still, this reviewer (already a steadfast fan of, return reader of, and constant babbler about Newport’s 2016 book Deep Work) decided to read the 2021 Newport work before moving on to this year’s bestseller — partially just to take things in order, but also because the 2021 topic seems more squarely aligned with the interests of Leading Edge. Slow Productivity, like Deep Work, seems oriented most toward the individual, whereas A World Without Email has a lot to say about teams, team culture, and how our communication practices affect the workplace experience.

1. Beware the “hyperactive hive mind.”

If we don’t take control of our communications and admin practices, they will take control of us — subjecting us to a never-ending barrage of pings, pop-ups, and interruptions. This always-connected, constantly switching between conversations, rapid-back-and-forth style of communication has become a default environment in knowledge work, and Newport refers to it as “the hyperactive hive mind.” 

“To be fair,” writes Newport, “the hyperactive hive mind is not obviously a bad idea. Among the benefits of this workflow is the fact that it's simple and incredibly adaptive.” And yet, “although natural,” he argues, it “has turned out to be spectacularly ineffective… This constant interaction with the hive mind… requires that you frequently switch your attention… [C]ontext switches, even if brief, induce a heavy cost in terms of mental energy—reducing cognitive performance and creating a sense of exhaustion”.

Newport has many ideas for alternatives to the hyperactive hive mind, and he freely admits that all of them are to some degree, inconvenient, unnatural, counterintuitive, complicated, and difficult. Yet, he persuasively argues, the hyperactive hive mind, precisely by means of its ease, lulls us into accepting enormous hidden costs; achieving better mental health (along with better productivity) is a prize for which it’s well worth paying those more obvious costs in terms of convenience, time, and simplicity. “Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term,” Newport notes, “but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.”

2. Distinguish between “work” and “workflow”.

Have you ever finished a long day at work — a day full of Zoom meetings, Slack messages, email, and updating your Asana/ClickUp/Monday/Trello/Notion/calendar/bullet journal/stack of Post-its, only to feel as if you spent eight hours working, but didn’t get any honest-to-goodness work done? You may be right. You may have spent all those hours not working but managing workflow. Both of these activities are important for knowledge work jobs, but they are different tasks.

As Newport observes, the hyperactive hive mind, with its constant interruptions, will never naturally suggest that it is time to stop doing workflow and start working. Time for concentrated, high-value work (“deep work”) needs to be set aside and protected. Yet, Newport argues, workflow management isn’t mere fluff — it is the vital work of coordinating projects across teams and his point isn’t to disparage it; to the contrary, he argues that workflow management can also be done more effectively and efficiently when it is systemized and taken seriously as something worth doing well.

The biggest enemies of good work and good workflow, Newport writes, are mid-context attention switching and communication overload. Minimize these, and we’ll improve our work, our workflows, and our work experience.

3. Workflow change can’t be top-down; teams need buy-in and some measure of control.

Change — even good change — is just hard. “Imagine you want to make a major change to your own or your organization's workflow,” writes Newport. “How can you avoid the inconveniences associated with this experimentation? You can't. You must instead adjust your mindset so that you no longer fear these annoyances.” For one person, a mindset shift can be hard enough. But to lead a mindset shift on a team is a challenge on another level. As Newport observes, “people don’t like changes they can’t control.”

Newport breaks this challenge into three steps:

Education — Help the team understand why change is needed and why the inconvenience will be worth it.

Buy-in — Generate specific ideas for new processes from discussion within the team (not by imposing them from the top down).

Adjustment — Create easy methods for improving the new workflow processes when issues arise. “In practice, you might be surprised by how few changes are actually suggested. It's the ability to make changes that matters…”

The book has far more detail, of course, than this review can capture — including nitty-gritty taskboard tactics; why office hours can be better than asynchronous messaging; why changes to your personal (non-team) workflow habits should be executed quietly, without announcement; and why phone calls are better than text messages to serve as emergency backup systems (texts could be a path to backsliding into hive-mind mode, whereas people will be hesitant to call each other unless truly needed). 

Whether you want to work with your team to improve collaboration together, or make personal changes in your workflow that help you perform better and simply breathe again, A World Without Email is worth your time.

For many of us, the sense of workplace fatigue dates back to the advent of email, which made communication easier but also more constant. "A World Without Email" is Cal Newport's exploration of how the "hyperactive hive mind" work culture, fueled by email's ascent, has led to widespread burnout, decreased productivity, and diminished mental health. Rich with practical insights, the book is a worthwhile read for anyone seeking to work more effectively and sustainably in our digital world.

Reading Edge: A World Without Email

The Song of Significance is a loving anthem to what Godin calls “significance,” and what Leading Edge calls “employee engagement.” What would it mean, Godin asks, if we did our work not just for the paycheck, or because the boss was watching? What if our jobs were about “work that matters created by people who care”? For us at Leading Edge, no question could be more central in the professional world.  

I have long been a fan of Seth Godin — especially his book This is Marketing, his pithy daily blog, and his podcast, “Akimbo.” But both the beauty and the limitation of much of his work is that it is — as this title advertises — a song. Which is to say, this book is not an action plan. It’s densely packed with wisdom, beautifully worded, and soars high in the clouds of abstraction. It’s long on poetry and short on practicality — and, to some extent, even internal consistency.  

The paradox lovers among us will appreciate this; some will find it frustrating. I count myself in both those camps at once. I found myself nodding vigorously along while reading, often enraptured, and yet I finished the book feeling not at all clear about how one might make all of its gorgeous principles into realities in my actual job. Now, it’s okay to ditch practicality for inspiration — more than okay! As Simon Sinek said, “Dr. King gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech, not the ‘I have a plan’ speech.” Still, for so professionally oriented an author as Godin, I wonder if he couldn’t have done more to hit both marks at once.  

To take just one example, Godin wants leadership to be central and decentralized at the same time. As the bee pictured on the cover foretells, Godin uses bee metaphors many times in the book: 

“Bees aren't self-organizing. They're simply organized, aware of what the other bees are doing and each bee's role in the journey of the hive. They have a culture of peer-to-peer awareness, not top-down authority. The same is true of all resilient, decentralized human organizations.” 

Yet Godin also returns, over and over, to the importance of top leaders setting the tone and culture, leading to creating these “leaderless” cultures. Strong horizontal cultures need strong vertical leadership; that strikes me as true, and also strikes me as a paradox, or, at least, a polarity. Godin discusses both sides of this polarity, but never directly acknowledges that the two poles are in tension or sets them up in the kind of dialogue that would help us manage their coexistence. The problem isn’t contradiction, per se, as much as avoidance of conceptual confrontation. 

But perhaps this is too harsh an assessment. Wisdom, after all, isn’t simple, and no amount of hand-holding from Godin could have made it so. Perhaps his project is to present readers with wisdom, in all its complexity and paradox, and leave us to find our syntheses and solutions for ourselves. 

Godin’s greatest talent may be aphorisms; nobody is more virtuosic or generous with them. Here are just a few of my favorites from this volume:

“Significant organizations are team-centric... The purpose of a beehive isn't to make honey; honey is a by-product of a healthy hive.” 

 “What actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes, and perceptions of the people who do the work.” 

“In-person meetings are now like caviar, rare and precious. And yet we waste them.” 

This book, too, is like caviar: rare, precious, and — it must be said — not for every taste, but, for those who appreciate it, well worth savoring.

"The Song of Significance" is a loving anthem to what Godin calls “significance,” and what Leading Edge calls “employee engagement.” What would it mean, Godin asks, if our jobs were about “work that matters created by people who care”? For us at Leading Edge, no question could be more central in the professional world.

Reading Edge: The Song of Significance 

Prof. Hilarie Lieb has taught economics at Northwestern University, and been active in Jewish lay leadership, for many years. She is now the president of the board at Jewish Free Loan Chicago, and in that capacity, she’s currently participating in the Chicago Leadership Seminar, a modified version of a Leading Edge program that improves the partnerships between CEOs and board chairs. Rabbi Megan GoldMarche is executive director of Tribe12, an organization connecting people in their 20s and 30s to Jewish life in Philadelphia. In that capacity, she is participating in Leading Executives, our executive leadership training program. 

None of this would be out of the ordinary, except that Prof. Lieb and Rabbi GoldMarche are mother and daughter! I sat down with them (well, “with” them via Zoom, that is) to hear their reflections as representatives of (quite literally) two generations of Jewish leadership.

R’ Megan: Three weeks ago. We were talking and my mom said, “I have to go, I have a call with my Leading Edge coach.” I was like, oh, I have a coach through Leading Edge too!

Prof. Hilarie: I didn’t realize Megan was involved with Leading Edge. I hadn’t heard about it until my executive director, Leah Greenblum, told me about it. She knows the Jewish nonprofit sphere, this is new to me.

R’ Megan: She didn’t realize that her niece, my cousin, Mimi Kravetz, is on the board of Leading Edge!

Prof. Hilarie: Small field. Just too small.

Prof. Hilarie: At Jewish Free Loan Chicago, we’re a startup; we just five months ago gave out our first loans. The way we work is still “all hands-on deck” at this point. With of course Leah doing most of the work as our only staff person. But as we move forward, we need to be intentional about separating out these board and professional roles, even while we’re so new. There are many models of how to do that, and of course we’re creating our own, based on all those possible models, and that’s the area I most hope to work on. In my life and career, I’ve often been the mentor. But earlier in my career, when  I would have been a mentee, this idea of mentorship wasn’t established as it is now. So, I hadn’t participated in a formal mentorship program. And now, it’s a gift to be on able to.

R’ Megan: I started a new job last spring as the executive director of a small nonprofit called Tribe 12, building Jewish community for people in their 20s and 30s in Philadelphia. And I'm trained as a rabbi, so this is my first executive director role. I had heard really positive things about Leading Edge programs and I reached out to Dena [Schoenfeld, Chief Programs Officer at Leading Edge] to see what types of programs might exist. I have so much to learn in this new role, and I've learned a lot even in the last ten, eleven months or so. I think it's just great to be part of a cohort of some folks who are in that same space. My coach has just been amazing as sort of a sounding board. This is my first time not having a supervisor, and it’s so valuable to have someone to ask questions and help me figure out my growing edges.

R’ Megan: I hope there are differences! Are you buying Leah [Greenblum, executive director of Prof. Hilarie’s organization] clothing? Did you take her shopping yet?

Prof. Hilarie: Not yet! It is interesting, because in our first meeting of the Leading Edge program, they asked us to think of some fictional characters we might think of as being parallels for the board chair and the executive director. And since I have two grandchildren who watch Frozen all the time, I said, Elsa and Anna, but in Frozen II, because that's really when they take on very separate roles. Initially, they're very interdependent, and then they differentiate. And there’s a parallel there to parenthood. As a parent, for me at least, at first I knew very little about being a parent. So, I think you are learning your roles together. And then at some points you feel like you are ready to give more guidance.

R’ Megan: My board chair and I are the same age. We are very much peers; we definitely don’t have a parent-child relationship. I think in an ideal world, you’re each bringing a different expertise to the partnership. We’re in different lanes. And it’s not a straightforward hierarchy. The board is legally the boss, but in a good dynamic, it’s a real partnership between the board chair and the ED, a sense of healthy interdependence. Of course, parenting is also not a boss relationship. My children are the boss of my household most of the time.

R’ Megan: It’s interesting: my mom, because of her work with college students, has always been in touch with the younger generations. I work now with people in their 20s and 30s, so as I age, I still feel very in touch with young people too. I think I am more in touch with Gen Z than many other older Millennials. But there are differences. I was raised to be a workaholic by my workaholic parents. Maybe Boomers and Millennials have similar work ethics. There’s also a generational divide around Israel, which is very difficult to speak about. That may be the biggest generational divide. And it comes up in our household, like any other. But overall, we’re aligned. Both of us are very committed to justice, what it means to bring non-Jews into our work, People of Color in our work, we’re on the same page.

Prof. Hilarie: People from my generation seem to still be very present in the Jewish nonprofit world.  It is important for us to be supportive, but we also need to make way for the next generation. I think that I'm in a good role right now because I can help mentor someone, but I'm not in it because I see this as something long-term. My goal is to share what I've learned and then step away and see this next generation lead. But my generation needs to think about supporting the next generation emotionally, financially, and intellectually, so they can be successful. And we’re doing that in this Leading Edge program. We're taking two different generations and really getting guidance and making that happen.

R’ Megan: I don’t know about “people need to get out of the way”. But we’re living in a strange time. My generation is, on average, going to be less wealthy than our parents. The older generations, at least from what I am seeing, have more wealth than my peers and I, and are more likely to have worked in the for-profit sector, giving my peers the ability to choose a career we love that might pay less. There’s often an interesting tension between board leadership who have more wealth and worked in the for-profit sector and nonprofit leaders who are making nonprofit salaries and trying to raise competitive salaries to pay young talented people. What does it mean to be generational wealth holders, and to be wealth seekers in the sense of being fundraisers? That’s a conversation we need to have more of.

Two generations of Jewish leadership reflect on their journeys and their generations.

A Mother/Board President, a Daughter/Executive Director, and a Tale of Two Leading Edge Programs

One of the most inspiring things my boss does is leave.

I joke! Well, on one level I joke. Gali Cooks, President & CEO of Leading Edge, is a phenomenal leader and when she’s at the helm of our organization, she is immensely valuable to our team and the field we serve. But here’s the way I really mean it: Gali is currently taking a three-month parental leave from Leading Edge, since she and her wife welcomed their second child, Gavi! 

Speaking both as a father and as one of her employees, Gali taking parental leave means an enormous amount to me. How much? Well, it’s one of the reasons I work at Leading Edge in the first place. 

I’m a full-time-working father, with three young kids at home (ages 7, 5, and 2, kenenahora—pictured at the top of this post!) and a wife who also works full-time. Fatherhood is not something incidental to me, it’s central. I try to do a good job at work, but my family comes before my work—and that’s not a close call. I’m glad to say that every nonprofit I’ve ever worked for has been accommodating of that stance to some degree or another, though of course some workplaces have been more flexible than others. 

So when, in 2019, I happened to read that Gali Cooks, CEO of Leading Edge, would be taking three months off for parental leave, I took note. (This was when Gali’s first child, her daughter Ami, was born.) At the time, I didn’t work for Leading Edge yet, but I knew some of the team and was already a fan of the organization’s work, and saw the notice in an email newsletter.

“Wow,” I thought. “A CEO taking a significant parental leave. That’s unusual. And that must be a family-friendly organization.”

Was I right to think that a CEO taking leave was unusual? Empirically I don’t really know—I can’t seem to find any overall data on how many CEOs take family leave, either in the nonprofit or business sectors. (Email me if you know any good data on this.) But it certainly doesn’t feel usual to me. It’s not something I see frequently, and when high-profile CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or Twitter’s Parag Agrawal take parental leave, it makes the news.

Whether it’s as rare as it seems or whether it’s more common than I think, a top leader taking leave—and publicizing it—is a powerful signal. At least, it was to me when I saw it from the outside in 2019. Later the same year, I heard that a communications opportunity was opening up at Leading Edge, and I was instantly interested. I had multiple reasons for wanting to work here (and to be clear, my previous organization was also a family-friendly one), but having seen Gali take parental leave gave me high confidence that among other ways it would be a great place to work, Leading Edge would certainly be a family-supportive employer. (And, for the record, I was right.)

So that’s my own experience. But this kind of signal from the top might be important for reasons beyond individual perspectives. Last year, Leading Edge released The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership: An Ecosystem View. That report identified five “keystones” for addressing the gender gap in top leadership in Jewish organizations, and one of them was this: “There is a perception that you cannot be both a top leader and a primary caregiver.” To address that problem, the report says, “Community members can work actively to shift our cultural assumptions about the capacity to be a leader and a primary caregiver at the same time.”

How can we “shift cultural assumptions”? What does it take to change the default stories we tell? There may be many answers to that question, but as Jonathan Larson wrote, “Don’t say the answer—actions speak louder than words.” (Or, if the Golden Age of musical theatre is more to your taste, “Show me!”) There are lots of ways to change minds, but it’s hard to beat walking the walk.

What if it were normal to see all our leaders being caregivers? And let’s be clear, they are caregivers already, whether we see it or not. Our leaders have families and communities. Some of them have children; some have elderly relatives; some have a friend or neighbor they help. The people we know by titles like “Boss,” “CEO,” or “board chair” leave the office and go home to places where they’re known by titles like “Mommy,” “Zeidy,” “my niece,” or “my nice neighbor who drives me to the doctor”. What if every leader made it a point to let their employees know about those other parts of their lives—not to erase their family’s privacy or make a reality show of their personal lives, but simply to let the existence and the extent of their participation in caregiving be better known? What kind of permission would that give to the people who work for them to think of ourselves as potential leaders, even as we have roles like “Daddy” that we value even more?

Speaking as a Daddy and a professional (in that order), that’s the kind of workplace and the kind of community where I want to be.

Speaking both as a father and as one of her employees, Leading Edge President & CEO Gali Cooks taking parental leave means an enormous amount to me. How much? Well, it’s one of the reasons I work at Leading Edge in the first place.

Louder than Words: What our CEO’s parental leave means to me as a father | Leading Edge

Louder than Words: What our CEO’s parental leave means to me as a father

There’s no question Wordle is brilliant. There’s a reason the New York Times was willing to pay seven figures for it. But the game’s meteoric rise was also, from a communications perspective, astonishing. So maybe it can help us learn to improve internal communications.

And yes, it’s likely that your internal communications could use improvement. In a 2021 survey of over 11,600 employees at 221 Jewish nonprofits, Leading Edge found that while most people experience good communications within their departments, only 59% of employees agreed that “There is good cooperation between teams/departments in my organization.” That’s a problem not only for immediate project work, but also for the longer-term goal of creating an amazing workplace culture. As Omicron recedes and workplaces experiment with new in-person and hybrid setups, getting internal communications right has never been more vital.

So here are five internal communications ideas inspired by Wordle.

Sometimes it’s tempting to go into Advertising Mode. “DON’T MISS this week’s team newsletter—updates you won’t believe!!!!” Advertising Mode is annoying. It feels desperate and insincere. It can even signal that the reason for the hype is that the thing we’re hyping is boring. 

There were no billboards or subway ads for Wordle. There were no pop-ups about it interrupting Candy Crush. Your favorite podcast hosts didn’t promote it in a paid ad—although they might have talked about it spontaneously.

And that’s the point. Here’s how marketing guru Seth Godin put it in 2015, many years before Wordle existed, but perfectly describing its rise: “Fast growth comes from overwhelming the smallest possible audience with a product or service that so delights that they insist that their friends and colleagues use it.” 

So it’s important to decide how to move information within our organizations, but it’s even more vital to make sure the information itself is genuinely valuable to people.

One way to do that is to ask colleagues, systematically and repeatedly, what they know about other departments, what they need to know, and where the gaps are. For Leading Edge, and for many organizations we work with, surveys are an underrated tool. (There's still time to register for our 2022 Employee Experience Survey, and pulse surveys are available year-round.)

Scarcity sells. When we can only play one daily game of Wordle, we’re eager to play again tomorrow, but given constant access, we’d get bored. The restricted pace also relaxes us and allows us time to think. 

Scarcity can be a friend in internal communications, too. Does that meeting need to be weekly instead of quarterly? Does your department head really need to send a three-page update instead of three sentences?

Scarcity is not only easier to handle for the receiver, but also leads to focus for the person providing information. Being forced to pare things back helps us identify what’s really necessary and authentic.

People crave connection—and Wordle delivers it. First, players all guess the same word each day. (At least, until recently!) Then they can use those box arrays to share their journey on that day’s puzzle without spoiling the answer for others. These social elements didn’t just make Wordle viral; they’re also key to making the game fun.

Getting social can help internal communications, too. People are much more likely to retain information if it comes with a meaningful and enjoyable connection with others. 

So, to reverse a now-ubiquitous saying: Maybe this email should be a meeting! 

Of course, meetings have their own dangers (there’s a reason for thinking many meetings could be emails!) but if they’re scarce and social, they can be great. Small group breakouts are one tool for interactive meetings. 

And social connection goes beyond meetings. Within the Leading Edge team, we have Slack channels for sharing memes, family photos, Wordle scores, and more. This kind of connection doesn’t feel work-related, but by improving relationships, it does improve the work.

Let’s be honest: When we share that grid of Wordle boxes, often part of our motivation is bragging that we got it in fewer guesses than our friends.

People like to compete. Leaders and employees at Jewish nonprofits tend to be egalitarian idealists, and may be reticent to embrace competitive energy, but while high-stakes competitions (such as for money and power) often bring out the worst in people, low-stakes competitions (like trivia night or Wordle) bring us together.

Within Leading Edge, when an internal communications working group was introducing some new document storage norms, we began with a competitive game of “Find That File.” The game experientially demonstrated the need for better file storage norms, while engaging people’s competitive sides.

You know what? We take it back about “not literally” with the colored boxes. What if literally?

Wordle is, obviously, verbal, but it’s also visual. The grids of colorful boxes not only draw the eye, but also manage to communicate information non-verbally, through a physical sense.

Learning through our senses is powerful. What are you more likely to remember tomorrow: this photo or a paragraph of text? 

Organizations constantly use visual illustrations—pie charts, slide decks, etc. But we’re deliberately expanding this point to other senses too, because not everyone can see. With creativity and care, every sense can convey information. What if a nonprofit commissioned a song each year as part of an annual internal report that encoded important performance indicators in tempo, tonality, or pitch? What if we realized that cake for an employee’s birthday is already a symbolic encoding of gratitude and connection into literal sweetness? 

So that’s five internal communications lessons from Wordle: Value, scarcity, connection, competition, and sensation. Will they solve all your problems? No. There are no sure-fire wins in internal communications, just as there is no starting word that makes you ace Wordle every day. But with whimsy and curiosity, organizations can break through ruts, defy expectations, and get information and relationships moving better than ever before.

The problem: Not enough communication between departments at your organization.

The solution: Colorful boxes.

Okay, maybe not literally. But hear us out.

Spreading the Wordle: Internal Communications Lessons from a Viral Word Puzzle | Leading Edge

Spreading the Wordle: Internal Communications Lessons from a Viral Word Puzzle

Seth Chalmer is Vice President, Communications at Leading Edge. He lives in Teaneck, NJ with his wife and children. His writing has appeared in publications including Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, The Los Angeles Times, On Being, First Things, Quillette, The Jewish Week, eJewish Philanthropy, and The Journal of Ecumenical Studies. A graduate of NYU’s Wagner-Skirball dual Masters program in Nonprofit Management and Judaic Studies, Seth also holds a B.F.A. in Musical Theatre from Wright State University. 

Seth joined Leading Edge in 2020. His previous nonprofit roles include Jewish Funders Network (Director of Communications); Berman Jewish Policy Archive (Assistant Director; it is now known as the Berman Archive); Dayton JCC (Cultural Arts Director); and the Center for Employment Opportunities (Retention Specialist), where he helped empower people returning home from prison to succeed in careers. 

Before his nonprofit career, Seth was an actor and performed in the 2004-5 national stage tour of “Sesame Street Live: Elmo’s Coloring Book.” (Oscar the Grouch and Professor Art), among other productions. 

Vice President, Communications

Seth Chalmer

Seth Chalmer is Vice President, Communications at Leading Edge.