Give people a part of your heart rather than a piece of your mind.
If you have visited my blog before, then you know I am extremely committed to helping nonprofits engage with their communities through social media. However, I sometimes encounter organizations that I know are not ready for social media, and so I advise them not to tweet a word.
When I watched the movie Lincoln I wondered how do we know what we know about his decision making, his mannerisms, his relationship with his wife?
Data, of course. Data in the form of government documents, personal letters, travel itineraries, transcribed debates, photographs, and speeches.
If you haven’t noticed lately, then take a look at the organic reach of your organization’s FB page. It’s going down.
Several studies have shown the organic reach of Facebook is around 6%. That means you can expect 6 out of 100 people to see each of your Facebook posts. It was 49 out of 100 just last October. That’s a big change, but why?
FB has gone public.
Images of the American Civil Rights movement both terrify me and make me proud.
They terrify me because of the brutality shown to people of color. They make me proud because the images are so distant from my children’s America that they require explanation.
Not long ago I watched the Freedom Riders documentary with my children. The Freedom Riders were a group of blacks and whites who set out to ride commercial buses across the South in order “to challenge local laws…that enforced segregation in seating.”
In the documentary it is sobering to watch a modern-day interview with John Patterson, the governor of Alabama during the Freedom Riders demonstration. In the interview Patterson admits that he was wrong to have labeled the Freedom Riders rebels, and if he had it to do over again he would support the Riders.
History is full of people who were first labeled rebellious but were later called pioneers. (click to tweet)
It’s easy to see now that leaders like Governor Patterson were on the wrong side of history, but what about in your organization or community?
How can you tell if a non-conformist is being rebellious or pioneering?
When you exceed promises, the need to self-promote evaporates.
It’s funny how strengths can foster weaknesses.
I had a roommate in college who was off the charts on intelligence. He could grasp an engineering concept in one lecture and do every practice problem without cracking a book. The down side to his gift was it enabled him to wait until the last minute to complete an assignment.
Meanwhile the below average student in our room, that’s me, had to work nightly to even hope of completing an assignment on time.
Since college I’ve continued to notice when it comes to handling time there are two kinds of people: managers and planners.
I had a boss one time who felt that his desk should be cleaned off at the end of each day. The only problem was “cleaned off” for him meant shoving everything into a catch-all drawer. He often forgot where he had “filed” things.
Most days either my wife or I will make the bed, but some days the bed goes unmade. Is that a sign of laziness?
Do productive people end each day with a clean desk? Do they always make the bed?
I tend to work with Type “A” leaders who treat productivity as a daily box to be checked. The truth is when it comes to being productive there are no boxes just different personalities and schedules.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. Click to Tweet
