Photo by Istvan Hernadi

You get the best effort from others not by lighting a fire beneath them,
but by building a fire within.
- Bob Nelson

Think of someone in your life who has been your leader. It might be a supervisor, a CEO, a teacher, a parent, a mentor, or a political figure. Why did you follow that person? What was it about what they did, about who they were?

If you generate a list of the characteristics of that person, it might include qualities like they are honest and forthright, empowering and challenging, inspirational and passionate. To me a key quality that a good leader has is vision. Yes I mean vision as in the ’vision thing’ – being able to visualize a profitable direction and make that direction clear and reachable for the people around them. That vision thing is about the future of an enterprise. But just as importantly, I mean the much simpler ability to see the people who are in front of you – being able to see them clearly in the present.

And what is seeing clearly? It is undeniably an act of generosity. Have you ever been in a situation where you were seen fully as who you are, with all of your strengths and your challenges? That is a true gift for all of us and tends to bring out our hardest and best work, our highest level commitment. When we are well and truly challenged by someone else, they are seeing what we can do (that we are not already doing) and it motivates us toward that better performance. When we are stuck in a system or an action and someone sees that and empowers us to free ourselves (or decides on a change to break that logjam), that not only opens an opportunity for us to deliver our best work, it also acknowledges that the logjam we were in was real and alterable.

It is an absolute no-brainer that acknowledgment and appreciation motivate and encourage follower-ship. Nothing more needs to be written about this. But what predicates acknowledgment and appreciation? Seeing the good work, seeing the person who did the good work, seeing the results of the good work. If you have ever gotten insincere appreciation you know that the person acknowledging you really did not see you or what you did.

As my good friend Kristin Kaufman of Alignment, Inc reminds us, being polite is also part of good leadership:

The strongest and most successful leaders with whom I have worked were the ones that took the time to thank, to acknowledge hard work, to say please and yes … to  say “I’m sorry” when a mistake had been made or an injustice had occurred.

And what is politeness? Seeing other people, acknowledging them as adults, and giving them the benefit of our consideration.

Are you getting the parallels here? If we are seen, challenged, our barriers are taken down, appreciated and treated politely, which all grow out of being seen clearly – we feel better about ourselves, we deliver better work, and guess what – we stick with our leader and follow them!

Good leadership is about seeing. And it is up to the leader to see. This means that to be a good leader and see people in their fullest authenticity and potential, you have to work on your ability to see clearly. Now this is not all rosy – leadership is challenging because you are also called on to see what is not working, who is not delivering results, and you must act on those things as well.

So how do you increase your ability to see? I have 2 simple suggestions:

• Practice by seeing yourself. Observe your own reactions, your own thoughts, your own feelings, and your own motivations (the list can go on…).
• Practice being more generous. Take the time to think about what would be a gift to the people around you and start giving it. Start with recognizing people’s good work and with politeness. Turn up the volume on these two and the others will follow.

Seeing clearly is much harder than it sounds and takes practice. It also goes rusty pretty quickly, especially when we are under stress. If you are going to be the leader that people want to follow, it is worth doing that practice – for the rest of your career.

We practice generosity with others and with ourselves, over and over again, and the power of it begins to grow until it becomes almost like a waterfall, a flow.
- Sharon Salzberg

Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden volunteering for Feeding America | Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images North America

We’re at the beginning of a generosity high, a sense that we can make a difference.
- Claire Gaudiani, historian of philanthropy at New York University

Today the Corporation for National and Community Service released a report called Volunteering in America, which shows that a total of 61.8 million Americans volunteered through an organization in 2008, up one million from the previous year. That translates into 8 billion hours of service in 2008, worth an estimated $162 billion.

In this time of economic distress, we need service and volunteering more than ever to build a new foundation for growth. This report suggests that Americans are responding to the hardship around them by reaching out in service to others, giving their time when they cannot give their money. It reminds us of the generosity of the American spirit, and challenges us to work harder to make service part of the daily life of every American.
- First Lady Michelle Obama

Less-formal ways of serving in communities have increased dramatically compared with organizational-based volunteering. 19.9 million people volunteered with their neighbors to fix a community problem in 2008 (up from 15.2 million in 2007). This suggests an emerging trend of self-organized ‘do-it-yourself’ service led by young adults. According to the report, the millennial generation (ages 16-24) are indicating a strong service ethic - over 8.2 million volunteered in 2008.

This is all good news for nonprofits, because a study from Johns Hopkins found that between September 2008 and March 2009, more than a third of nonprofit organizations reported increasing the number of volunteers they use, and almost half foresee increasing their use of volunteers in the coming year. In addition, volunteers are more than twice as likely to donate to a charity or nonprofit organization as individuals who do not volunteer, so this increased engagement may assist them in the fundraising area as well.

The report is on line, and gives interactive maps and graphs with volunteering trends, statistics, tools, resources, and information by State and also by city.

• What are you doing to enrich your own and other’s lives through public service?
• If you want do more, visit www.serve.gov and begin the process of engaging.

It’s about touching lives, and the way the volunteer and the community are enriched by the experience.
- Nicola Goren, Acting CEO, Corporation for National and Community Service

John C. Maxwell

Nothing speaks to others more loudly or serves them better
than generosity from a leader.
- John Maxwell

John C. Maxwell is an evangelical Christian author, speaker, and pastor who has written more than 50 books, many of which are for a secular business audience and primarily focusing on leadership. He has sold more than 16 million books such as Developing the Leader Within You and The 360° Leader.

The measure of a leader is not the number of people who serve him
but the number of people he serves.
Generosity requires putting others first.
If you can do that, giving becomes much easier.
- John Maxwell

In his book, The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader, Maxwell has a chapter titled, Generosity: Your Candle Looses Nothing When it Lights Another in which he gives five suggestions for cultivating the quality of generosity in the leader’s life:

• Be grateful for whatever you have
• Put people first
• Don’t allow the desire for possessions to control you
• Regard money as a resource
• Develop a habit of giving

As you can see, these are more personal development suggestions than they are leadership techniques. As personal values and beliefs will inform leadership, these personal practices will make a difference to the success of a leader. They are not particularly difficult to practice and worth considering.  How much do you see generosity in leaders you admire?  How much does your generosity affect your ability to inspire followers?

Just the very act of letting go of money, or some other treasure,
does something within us. It destroys the demon greed.
- Richard Foster

Photo Eric Robinson (http://ericrobinson.net)

Leadership Generosity entails giving others latitude, permission to make mistakes, and all the information that they need to do their job. It’s making sure they have the authority that goes with responsibility – it’s giving them due credit for their ideas. In a nutshell, all of this translates to generosity of spirit, a quality we admire in leaders.
- Glenn Stevens

Glenn Stevens is a systems analyst and former project manager for Gallup, who is now a global marketing entrepreneur and writes a blog called the Fast Growth Home Business Blog. It is not entirely clear why he is writing about organization leadership, however his insights are compelling. Here, for example, he takes the definition of generosity and applies it to good leadership practice:

Generosity, a word which derives from “of noble birth,” used to be associated with members of the aristocracy who, by virtue of their privileges, were expected to show generosity towards those in lesser standing. A leader too, by virtue of their position, and the power and privileges that they hold relative to those they lead, has the same expectations and obligations. A prime obligation is to lead with a generous heart, and to be guided by a nobility of mind. It is the habit of giving without coercion. A leader’s generosity has a positive spreading effect. Conversely, its absence can also have a series of negative consequences that, if a leader paused to reflect on them, may stop them in their tracks.

Stevens also gives a number of action steps to enhance generosity in leadership (these are abridged, so please visit the original posting for the full commentary):

• Give people a sense of importance and meaning: Consider what small actions you can take today to make people feel that the work they do is important, and that they themselves, as people, are important to your team. Help connect the dots for them and help them see how they can and have helped others.
• Give encouragement and feedback, not criticism: If giving frequent criticism is your style of management, consider some of these questions: Is your motivation genuine, or is it to gain points? Are you picking the right moment? Are you stopping to reflect how you might deliver the feedback while still honoring the other person?  As a leader, giving people the gift of not just our appreciation for good work, but our genuine admiration for their talents, is generosity of spirit at its pinnacle… When you see good work, say it, and say it from the heart, just as you thought it…
• Give people visibility: Giving people visibility on your team is a special gift we can give to help others shine and grow. Knowing that your leader is representing us well to senior leaders and upper management in your organization is a high-octane motivator, and engenders fierce loyalty.
• Know when to forgive: Martin Luther King said that “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind…” A characteristic of a generous person is a total lack of resentment – it’s in effect being too noble, too big for that. Who do you need to forgive? What do you need to let go?
• Share your knowledge and experience: Resolve to become a philanthropist of know-how. What knowledge, expertise, or best practices can you share with others as a way to enrich them?
• Give anonymously: Real generosity of spirit is doing something for someone without their knowledge. Do something for someone today that will really help without them ever knowing you gave that help.  That is real generosity!

As you continue to grow as a leader, consider how much you are engendering the kind of motivation, commitment, cooperation you seek. If you look over your shoulder and find that the people following you need more of these qualities, consider increasing your generosity by using Stevens’ advice.

Giving, leading with generosity, being grateful are all like building a muscle. It requires practice and persistence – once it becomes habitual, you will emerge as a stronger leader.
- Glenn Stevens

photo: www.flickr.com/lieliel

What do they really mean when they say philanthropy? The word literally means ‘love of humankind.’ The definition we use comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which says philanthropy is ‘the giving of time, money, and know-how to advance the common good.’ This definition complements the one commonly used by scholars, who treat philanthropy in all cultures throughout history as giving outside one’s family.
- from Looking Out for the Future

Katherine Fulton and Andrew Blau have written a wonderful orientation document for people who are making financial gifts now and considering their future roles in philanthropy. The previous post was about Katherine Fulton, so look there for more information on her and click on Mr. Blau’s name above for more information on him.  The guide is partially geared toward an audience in the world of charitable foundations but is well worth reading for anyone who makes charitable donations and plans to continue doing so. Do you consider yourself a philanthropist based on the definition above? Whether you do or not, read on for more information about Looking Out for the Future: An Orientation for Twenty-First Century Philanthropists.

Philanthropy is all about choices: the choice to give, the choice of how to give and who to give to, even the choice of when to declare victory or admit failure. It’s a profoundly voluntary act with profoundly important consequences. The choices matter not just because donors contribute to important causes and inspiring people, but because philanthropists contribute to shaping the future for all of us.
- From Looking Out for the Future

Andrew Blau, photo: Global Business Network

In a section called Seeds of Change in Philanthropy, the Orientation has a series of suggestions as to how you might respond to patterns they see emerging of how innovative philanthropy is done in the U.S. Among the changes detailed in the sub-section Experimenting with Grantmaking Strategies are these that might apply readily to individual donors:

Supporting organizations, not just programs. Concerned that the bias toward project support (that itself emerged from an earlier call for focus and accountability in philanthropy) oft en leaves grant recipients without resources to operate and respond eff ectively, some funders have moved to providing core operating support.

Becoming more focused and persistent. The alignment of interests between the funder and recipient is also reinforced by an emphasis on becoming more focused and persistent, thereby creating a lasting and collaborative relationship between a donor or collection of donors and an organization or group of organizations devoted to a shared set of goals and objectives.

High-engagement giving.

Funder as initiator and operator. Some grantmakers are no longer waiting for ideas from the field, but are initiating their own projects, identifying strategies, and soliciting organizations to pursue those strategies.

In a later section called Imagining the Future, the authors recommend creating scenarios as a way to challenge ‘our assumptions about what might happen and why, and our strategies for adapting to change.’ The document contains a number of provocative scenarios by the authors, which are really worth looking over, before you consider your own.

Two final pieces are worth pointing out. The first is their inspiring list of other resources; some of these are published in hard copy and some are web resources. The other is their helpful diagram of Putting All the Pieces Together, which captures the interrelatedness of our gifts to other forces of positive social change. The whole document is available on the Future of Philanthropy web site and many of the individual pages of the report are also available as individual pdfs on the site. It is a rich resource.

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
- Albert Camus

…once in a lifetime the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
- Seamus Heaney

Katherine Fulton at TED | www.leslieimage.com

What do current trends in philanthropy tell us about what we might expect in the future? Katherine Fulton is a speaker and author about philanthropy and social change. In her video lecture on TED, she envisions us – you and I – and all of us, as leaders in philanthropy to effect social change.

Fulton shows how philanthropy now is moving toward global reach and efforts, it is entrepreneurial, and is democratizing, where the average person has more power than at any time in the past. To show this, she gives 5 categories of experiments, each of which challenges an old assumption about philanthropy. In this list there are many organizations that you may want to look up; I have not hot-linked them for your ease in reading, however a web search will pop up any of them:

• Mass collaboration through sites like Wikipedia and WISER – World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility and the work of Paul Hawken who wrote the recent book, Blessed Unrest.

We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have we have Wikipedia… Suddenly big things can be done for love.
- Clay Shirky

• Online philanthropy marketplaces: Kiva, Global Giving, Network for Good, Donor Choose, Youth Give, Give India, and many others challenge the idea that organized philanthropy is only for the wealthy.
• Aggregated giving: Acumen fund, New Profit, New Schools Venture Fund, Venture Philanthropy Partners, and Global Fund for Women build philanthropy communities and challenge the assumption that each giver should have his/her own fund.
• Innovation Competitions: Efforts like X Prize place the problem at the center of the effort rather than the giver and the organization.
• Social investing: Organizations like Xigi.net refute the idea that business and philanthropy are separate and distinct. They are creating a way for businesses that have a financial bottom line can use a small portion of their economic clout to develop social capital markets.

Fulton then talks about the future:

Our ability to confront the problems that we face has not kept pace with our ability to create them. It is no exaggeration to say that we hold the future of our civilization in our hands as never before. We are going to need a new generation of citizen leaders willing to commit ourselves to growing and changing and learning as rapidly as possible.

Finally she offers us this way of imagining what we hope for:

I want you to imagine that this is a photograph of you, and I want you to think about the community that you want to be a part of creating, whatever that means to you. And I want you to imagine that it’s 100 years from now, and your grandchild, or great-grandchild, or niece or nephew or god-child, is looking at this photograph of you. What is the story you most want for them to tell?

Photo of you today as seen 100 years from now - imagine...

Here is the video of Katherine Fulton speaking at TED: