Basics of Nonprofit Leadership

Define your mission, vision, values, and strategy to build trust, credibility, and donor support; apply three actions to win and align your nonprofit leadership.

Discover how impact mindsets drive nonprofit leadership by identifying and crushing limiting beliefs across the world changers inner journey’s five stages.

Assess your nonprofit's current mindsets to distinguish impact enhancing mindsets rooted in love from impact limiting mindsets rooted in fear, using the keep change exercise to map and shift culture.

Shift from impact limiting to impact enhancing mindsets by identifying your team’s from and to, envisioning the possible, breaking resistance, and prototyping the future.

Apply the influence model to shift from debilitating perfectionism to healthy vulnerability in nonprofit teams, using role modeling, understanding and conviction, reinforcement mechanisms, skills for change, and personal choice.

Develop impact skills with a 70-20-10 learning model—on the job, through coaching, and formal training—to reduce turnover in nonprofits. Build internal leadership to break the turnover cycle.

Assess your nonprofit's current skill state by using a two-category skill inventory—character skills and action skills—and apply the provided worksheet to align capabilities with impact.

Unleash your strengths as nonprofit leaders to boost happiness, confidence, energy, and performance, using coaching questions and practical assignments to drive strengths-based impact.

Identify and mitigate fatal flaws in nonprofit leadership. Use honest feedback from a truth teller to convert weaknesses into manageable behavior and strengthen overall impact.

Identify the future state of your nonprofit's skills by answering the four questions—mission, vision, values, strategy—then develop or hire those skills and complete the future state skills worksheet.

Learn how repeatable impact systems prevent nonprofit flailing and free soloing, with real-world examples like STRIVE's collective impact, World Reader pilots, and for Charlotte's citywide collaboration.

Explore the current state of nonprofit systems by examining finance and people systems, their inputs and outputs, and how mission-specific systems adapt to diverse organizations.

Learn how to create a value stream map for a nonprofit, documenting current state processes, identifying waste, and routing continuous improvement toward an improved future state.

Evaluate whether your nonprofit has the right systems by using value stream maps to define a future state, identify value-added stages, and pursue lean improvements.

Trace lean's Toyota origins and the 14 principles, and explore how nonprofits apply continuous improvement to boost impact through just-in-time flow, pull systems, and standardized work.

Identify and eliminate the eight wastes—defects, overproduction, waiting, underused talent, transportation, inventory, motion, and excess processing—using lean management to maximize nonprofit impact.

Adopt just in time and a pull system to regulate flow, cut eight wastes, and boost nonprofit impact via lean basics and value stream maps.

Explore how lean leadership uses go and see to uncover front line wisdom and solve problems. Embrace kaizen, five S's, and go and see examples in nonprofits to sustain improvement.

Learn how to create a continuous improvement culture in your nonprofit by pairing lean techniques with full top-team buy-in, using value stream maps, and relentlessly pursuing waste reduction.

Identify key performance indicators as quantifiable measures of nonprofit impact, distinguishing input vs output, auto vs choice, and individual vs collective metrics to leverage the observer effect.

Explore visual management by examining real KPIs, performance boards, and daily standups to drive lean, continuous improvement, and measurable nonprofit impact.

Learn how regular performance dialogues, including kaizen, stand-up meetings, and one-on-one reviews, drive continuous improvement in nonprofit leadership by focusing on the key performance indicators and visual management.

Shift from assessment to coaching in one-on-one conversations by applying the seven questions from the coaching habit and the top three card to enable ten-minute coaching for nonprofit teams.

Define your nonprofit's broader team and identify ideal attributes for board, staff, and volunteers—curiosity, resourcefulness, and grit—and cultivate them for impact.

Discover the ten commandments of nonprofit boards and apply them to governance to respect time, focus on mission, and leverage board member relationships for impact.

Learn the ten commandments for leading staff, from praising in public and private critique to setting reachable deadlines, sharing credit, owning mistakes, protecting trust, and improving communication.

Master the ten commandments of volunteers to unleash nonprofit impact through organized, clear, and appreciative engagement. Learn to train, communicate changes, and schedule meetings with respect for volunteers' time.

This course equips nonprofit leaders to maximize impact through a three-phase framework—mindsets and skills, processes, and measurements—using lean, value stream maps, and KPIs on performance boards.