Reflecting on the Competing Ones
By Fabienne Doucet, Ph.D., Executive Director, NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools
Introduction
I am the first woman Executive Director of the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools (NYU Metro Center) in its 45-year history, a position I started in January 2022. In this role, I have the privilege of supporting the work of a complex collective of multiple centers, programs, and projects with different areas of specialization (e.g., research and evaluation, bilingual education, racial disproportionality in special education, raising educators’ critical consciousness, and youth organizing)--all under the umbrella of NYU Metro Center. In a nutshell, we are a research and professional learning services center that supports equity-focused, evidence-based innovations in educational research and programming. Prior to this role, I spent most of my career as a university professor, followed by a three-year leave from my faculty position to work as a program officer at a research foundation. Though over my 20+ years post Ph.D. I have taken on positions of increasing leadership, this ED role is my most visible and the one in which I have the most responsibility.
Overview of Juggling the “Competing Ones”
As a new ED, I was in need of community, and when I learned about the Aurora Commons and Change Elemental Navigating Change: Executive Transitions with BIPOC Leaders program for the Ford Foundation’s Civic Engagement & Government grantees, I recognized an opportunity to find it. I then responded to the invitation to host a Bridging Generations three-part conversation on one of the biggest challenges I was facing in my new role: where to begin as a new leader when you feel pulled in myriad directions, with many priorities feeling equally important. The series, entitled Juggling the “Competing Ones” as a BIPOC Executive Director, brought together BIPOC leaders with a range of experiences to discuss commonly encountered and pressing challenges for new BIPOC EDs with room to organically explore other topics that bubble to the surface. The language of “Competing Ones” was a gift from one of my graduate school mentors, Peggy Dilworth-Anderson. I call this a gift because there is power in finding language to name an experience, a struggle, or even a good feeling that you know you are living in your body but have not been able to identify. In naming the “Competing Ones,” Dr. Dilworth-Anderson gave us graduate students the ability to pinpoint the particular discomfort and slight panic of trying to choose where to begin when everything on your to-do list is a One (or feels that way). This recognition doesn’t solve the problem, but it affords a measure of freedom: If everything is a One, then *starting* is more important than where you actually start. This is the logic I applied to what I identified as the key issues to be addressed at NYU Metro Center to ensure its success in its next incarnation under my leadership:
Organizational structure and culture change
Fundraising
Working with boards
Each conversation with other BIPOC leaders was supportive and generative, evidence of the value of professional learning communities (PLCs) and peer mentorship. More familiar in educator circles, PLCs are spaces for collaborative problem-solving where colleagues can exchange ideas and share results as they test new strategies for addressing problems of practice. Each conversation in the Competing Ones series was an opportunity to form a micro-PLC for BIPOC leaders to share their experiences, challenges, and lessons learned around each topic. It’s also worth naming the value of this PLC being an affinity space for BIPOC. There are specific obstacles we face in positions of leadership as BIPOC, such as doubts about our competence, microaggressive moves by colleagues we supervise, and fancy titles that lack any real teeth. Being in spaces where we know these issues are off the table goes a long way in setting a baseline of trust from which frank conversations can emerge.
Below, I will provide a brief overview of each session of the Competing Ones series and its guiding questions, and I’ll share some of the collective wisdom and resources that were exchanged. I encourage fellow BIPOC leaders to reflect on the guiding questions and hope they can benefit from our shared learnings.
Culture Change, Fundraising, and Board Wisdoms and Resources
The first session focused on two themes related to organizational structure: how to engender culture change following a shift in organizational structure, and how to put out fires we didn’t start. Some guiding questions for the first theme included the following:
How, if at all, does the current structure of your organization reflect the organization’s mission, vision, and values?
How do you determine whether a culture shift is needed?
What strategies have you used, or do you plan to use, to shift your organizational culture?
Related to the second theme, we considered;
What are some of the challenges you have inherited in your new role?
What kinds of supports do you need (or have you solicited) to help you address these challenges?
What are your coping strategies?
Session two, focused on fundraising, tackled cultivating relationships with funders, whether or not to hire development officers, securing funds for personnel and operational expenses, right sizing personnel and other-than-personnel expenses, and alternative models for fundraising. Funders are notorious for their reluctance to fund operations, and yet operational costs take up a significant proportion of organizational budgets. Fundraising is also extremely time-consuming and not everyone’s strong suit. Our conversation was guided by the following questions:
Historically, what has been your organization’s approach to fundraising?
What fundraising puzzle(s) are you trying to solve?
Development officers: indispensable or nonessential?
What are some potentially unexplored sources of revenue for your organization?
Our final session addressed boards of all kinds (governing boards, advisory boards, fundraising boards). Boards can serve many functions, and in some organizations, they are non-negotiable, but there are circumstances in which new EDs may have to decide whether or not to form a board. Questions for reflection included the following:
As new EDs, how can we ensure we are developing healthy and positive relationships with our boards?
If our organizations doesn’t have a board, should we form one?
How do you choose board members (when you have a choice)?
What are the pros and cons of working with different kinds of boards?
How do you negotiate power differences with your board?
Our collective wisdom during these discussions surfaced many ideas, strategies, and resources. I am pleased to share them here for the benefit of other new BIPOC leaders.
NYU Metro Center Experience, Wisdom, and Resources for Juggling
Key to deciding which “One” to attend to first is a solid strategic plan. To generate NYU Metro Center’s first ever strategic plan, I closely studied the approach of strategy guru Richard Rumelt who defines good strategy as “an effective mixture of thought and action with a basic underlying structure” consisting of three elements: 1) a diagnosis; 2) a guiding policy; and 3) coherent actions. For the diagnosis phase, I worked with other members of the senior leadership team (our Chief of Staff, Director of Finance, and Deputy Executive Director of School Change and Community Engagement) to conduct a SOAR analysis, which helped identify our primary areas of need and provided some clues and insights as to how we might address them. We then reflected on our existing sources of advantage to develop guiding policies, and finally determined a set of coherent actions.
As leaders know, organizational structures communicate to the outside world and to members of the organization what you value. At NYU Metro Center, inspired by the work of Jess Moore Matthews, Founder and Chief Good Troublemaker of Backbone Digital Leaders, I changed our organizational structure to be displayed inversely from how organizational charts are typically represented. Instead of showing the Executive Director at the top of the chart, the top of our chart is populated by the colleagues, programs, and projects whose work is closest to the students, communities, schools, educators, and leaders with whom we partner. This structure also illustrates our infrastructure of support for the powerful and life-affirming work of NYU Metro Center.
Yet simply changing organizational structure is not enough for organizational culture change. Organizational cultures develop over time and become entrenched. Engineering culture change can be facilitated by consultants who specialize in organizational culture, team-building, and identifying and implementing structures and practices that encourage and support better communication. Having consultants facilitate culture change can be especially useful when a change in leadership also involves a change in leadership style, for example from a leader-centered hierarchical style to a distributive style that promotes transparency, input from others, collaboration, inquiry, fairness, and consensus building.
Leaning into project management and establishing solid workflows can be an excellent strategy for coping with transitioning into a leadership role, changing organizational structure, and engineering culture change. One useful resource for putting organizational workflows in place is David Allen’s bestselling Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Computer applications for project management and collaboration also provide essential tools for keeping organizations working efficiently. A fan of the Kanban method of project management long before the advent of products like Trello (I literally have a bulletin board in my office organized and covered in post-its like the original designed by Taiichi Ohno for Toyota in the 1940s), I nevertheless wanted a tool that met the needs of other team members and provided a hub or repository for our policies and processes, goals, meeting notes, and so on, so we adopted Coda, a deceptively simple product based on docs and spreadsheets that has been truly invaluable.
Among the obstacles most often encountered by new (and even some experienced) leaders is not having a full picture of the cost of running their organization. Equipping yourself with this essential information as an ED sets you up to fully understand your funding needs and make your fundraising plans accordingly. It also facilitates goal-setting for the immediate, short-, medium-, and long-term. A useful resource to aid in this process is the Nonprofit Finances Fund’s Full Cost Workbook. The workbook walks you through calculating your needs in six areas: total expense, working capital, reserves, debt principal repayment, fixed asset additions, and change capital. In the case of NYU Metro Center, walking through this workbook with our Director of Finance was a sobering yet valuable and instructive exercise. It provided us the 360° picture of our finances we needed in order to make decisions for moving forward.
Some organizations have dedicated teams for development and/or grant-writing, but smaller shops may not have the resources for such specialized personnel. Despite being housed within New York University, NYU Metro Center (like most other centers on campus) raises its own funds, so one of the overarching coherent actions we devised was to pursue multiple avenues for improving our financial health. I call this an overarching coherent action because, of course, under this broad umbrella is a detailed set of concrete actions, like launching income-generating projects and pursuing unrestricted operational grants in addition to programmatic grants. To help with this latter action, we enlisted the support of 360° grant support organization Elevate, which has proven instrumental in our fundraising efforts. We also made the decision not to explicitly pursue traditional development opportunities (i.e., individual gifts) at this time given our limited capacity and the (rightful) investment of time for relationship-building most philanthropic giving requires.
And speaking of relationship-building, this is also at the core of successful engagement with boards, no matter the type. At NYU Metro Center, we still have not made a decision about building an advisory board, but for the time being, we are directing our focus elsewhere. For other BIPOC leaders who participated in the series, managing board relationships was a priority. At the risk of sounding simplistic, the key is practicing effective communication. While power dynamics can be tricky, leaders should beware of how potentially faulty perceptions such as competing goals or interests can create problems where there are none. Transparency, trust, and an eye on shared objectives are essential to effective communication.
At the time of this writing, I have been in my ED role for 18 months. Throughout this journey, I have benefitted from the mentorship of senior colleagues, and I am certain that will continue. I am also deeply grateful for the collaborative spirit and support within the professional learning community I found through the Aurora Commons and Change Elemental Navigating Change initiative. It is inspiring to know that across the many areas of our work, we are all working towards a future of continued growth, impact, and inclusivity.
Return to the main page to see more highlights from “Navigating Change: Toward Equitable, Democratic Organizations,” a series on bridging generations, expanding leadership, and envisioning the future of work by ten Content Fellows.