The Bamboo Project Blog

Guest Blogging on Career Development at "Pick the Brain"

One of my favorite self-improvement sites is Pick the Brain, run by John Wesley. Recently John asked for guest bloggers, so I submitted some pieces I'd written on finding your ideal career. The first post is up and includes several exercises for figuring out what you want to be when you grow up. If you're starting to feel antsy about your career or know someone who could use some guidance, I encourage you to take a look. And while you're there, check out some of John's other great content, including this article, Why the 9-5 Worker Will Become a Thing of the Past (shades of our ROWE discussions, yes?)  and 27 Blogging Lessons.

Thanks to John for agreeing to publish these posts so that I get another outlet for my passion about personal and professional development.

More Support for a Results Oriented Work Environment

Some more support for the Results Oriented Work Environment I've been spouting off about lately. . .

Today's New York Times has an interesting article--Time Wasted? Perhaps It's Well Spent. It notes:

American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two. And Steve Pavlina, whose Web site (stevepavlina.com) describes him as a “personal development expert” and who keeps incremental logs of how he spends each working day, urging others to do the same, finds that we actually work only about 1.5 hours a day. “The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.”

So how are we wasting all that time? Some say surfing the Net, but others point to the 5.6 hours per week we spend in worthless meetings, or the 1.5 hours per week we spend rifling through our desks looking for that report we KNOW is there somewhere. I'd argue that a fair amount of time is also spent fending off co-worker chit chat that is neither building team spirit nor leading to anything productive being accomplished.

Regardless, the article suggests that productivity is being measured by an old paradigm that is no longer workable in a knowledge worker economy:

Mr. Kustka assures me that the problem is not the three to four hours of concentrated work I do each day, but rather the outmoded paradigm against which I measure that work. Productivity was directly related to time back when Mr. Gilbreth was measuring things, he said, but the connection is less direct today.

“We are in a knowledge-worker world,” he says. “If you were building me a building, I could measure the number of bricks. If you were loading a truck, I could measure the number of boxes. But I can’t simply count your words. That doesn’t measure quality.” . . .

“The old thinking says ‘the longer it takes, the harder you’re working,” says Lynne Lancaster, a founder of BridgeWorks, a business consulting firm. “The new thinking is ‘if I know the job inside and out and I’m done faster than everyone else then why can’t I go home early?’

Which leads back to ROWE . . .

On a related note, go visit Shannon Turlington, who is running her own personal experiment in managing using ROWE. And via email, I found out that Rosetta Thurman's organization is also considering the concept as a way to deal with space issues in their organization. I'm curious to see how things go for them.

Attracting Older Workers to the Nonprofit Sector

The Chronicle of Philanthropy is reporting today that nonprofit agencies lag behind business and government agencies in attracting older workers:

Nonprofit groups lag significantly behind government agencies and businesses in their efforts to keep and recruit older workers, a new report concludes.

"Many nonprofit leaders, boards, and funders show little interest in developing programs to attract and retain older adults as experienced executives, staff personnel, or volunteers in new, more professional roles," says the report, which was issued today by the Conference Board, a business research and membership organization in New York.

The article goes on to indicate that the combination of increasing numbers of jobs in the sector, particularly in healthcare and social services, along with the higher turnover rates in nonprofits (3.1% on average) may be putting many nonprofits in a bind if they fail to do something about it. Some of my thoughts:

• Develop work options that are attractive to retiring boomers--the 20-hour work week, working from home or having a more "mobile" presence in the community with lots of scheduling flexibility.
• Take a look at your job design. Are there ways you could recombine job responsibilities to allow for more flexibility or to capitalize on an older worker's particular talents or strengths?
• Create work that is engaging and has impact--Most boomers don't like "busy work." Try to design job opportunities that allow older workers to use their areas of expertise and that will keep them engaged and interested in your organization.
• Work with other nonprofits to implement a marketing campaign designed to attract older workers to the sector. One thought is to sponsor some kind of "What Will You Do in the Next Phase of Life" campaign where you help people take a look at their interests and talents and then help them decide how they could use these in the nonprofit sector. Here are some resources that could help in developing a career plan.
   
• Talk to people who are retiring. Find out what would attract them to nonprofit jobs. Have them help you come up with ideas and a marketing campaign.

A few things off the top of my head . . . 

The Power (and Pain) of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Fast Company has an interesting article in their May 2007 issue (sorry--not available online at this point) by Chip and Dan Heath of Made to Stick fame on the power of self-fulfilling prophesies. Entitled "Success Can Make You Stupid," the Heath brothers write about how Hollywood pumps out bad films because they get into a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies. What caught my eye, though, was this gem of a quote:

"HR is another hotbed of self-fulfilling prophecies. The researcher Albert King told a welding instructor at a vocational training center that five of his incoming students had unusually high aptitude. In fact, the students had been picked randomly. And yet random yielded reality. The "high potentials" were absent less often than other trainees, learned the basics in about half the usual time, and scored 10 points higher than others on a welding test. Even the other trainees noticed. They chose the five high potentials as their most preferred coworkers.

Is it possible high potentials across America perform better solely because, like movies, they have been given more attention and resources than they truly merit?"

Hell yeah, as this article on the Pygmalion effect (a fancy term for self-fulfilling prophecy) makes abundantly clear (read the article for some other great info on the effect):

In another classic experiment, Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson worked     with elementary school children from 18 classrooms. They randomly chose     20% of the children from each room and told the teachers they were "intellectual     bloomers."

They explained that these children could be expected to show remarkable     gains during the year. The experimental children showed average IQ gains     of two points in verbal ability, seven points in reasoning and four points     in over all IQ. The "intellectual bloomers" really did bloom!

So here's a question--or actually a few.

• How often do our belief systems influence how we see our coworkers and how do they impact the resources with which we provide them and the ways in which we interact?

• What about how we treat our clients? Are we making judgments that negatively influence the resources, supports and strategies we make available because we expect too much (or too little) of our customers?

• Is the self-fulfilling prophecy influencing how we look at our "tried and true" organizational strategies? Is it possible that we're backing the wrong horses, putting resources where they actually are doing less good than if we really looked at the facts?

• Are we short-changing our coworkers, our clients and our organizations because we rely on subjective beliefs rather than analyzing objective information?

I would argue in a lot of cases the answers to all of these questions are yes. Mental models are powerful things and breaking free of their influence has to be intentional and ongoing. It's a battle I fight with myself all of the time and one I wish I'd make greater progress toward winning.

The Heath's suggest that there's a moral in all of this for us to consider:

Question success. Success propagates backwards in our minds and bestows the glow of wisdom on our every decision. The irony of self-fulfilling prophecies is that even bad ideas end up looking right in the end, because we've salvaged them with good execution. And when bad ideas get reinforced, there are other consequences: The wrong movies get pushed.The wrong deals get funded. The wrong employees get advanced."

So is success making us stupid? And what can we do to break the cycle? 

Creating a Learning Climate for Nonprofit Staff

Awhile ago, Allan Benamer of the Nonprofit Tech Blog talked about nonprofit staff as knowledge workers and how technology and work processes need to support staff whose value comes primarily from their ability to make effective use of knowledge and information in working with customers. If we're to fully capitalize on the promise of a knowledge network, then staff need to have the tools, resources and supports necessary to truly fulfill their function.

This idea has been rolling around in my head for awhile now. My primary role in my consulting practice is to build organizational capacity, in part by building staff capacity through training and ensuring that staff have what they need to get their jobs done. Part of my fascination with technology lies in its power to help staff better manage knowledge and information to become highly skilled in their jobs. I keep feeling like we're missing some key pieces of the puzzle in terms of how we work with staff. They seem to be the forgotten ones. Developing their capacity is low on the list of priorities beneath things like accounting systems, how to raise more money and marketing. Yet in most nonprofits, without our staff, we are really nothing.

Earlier this week I talked about informal learning and the need to create an environment that supports  ongoing professional development.  I believe that informal learning ("the other 80%") is a crucial element of staff capacity-building, but one to which we pay little attention.

Here are a few ingredients I think we need to create a climate that supports informal learning.

• A team of staff who have passion for the work they do. Passion is critical. If you don't love what you do, then you're not going to be devoted to doing things to make yourself better at it. And there's nothing better for learning than being surrounded by people who are excited about their work and want to get better every day at what they do.

• Managers who nurture curiosity. Personally I don't think there's enough curiosity in the world. When my girls were 3-4 years old, all we heard was "Why?" But it seems that when we grow up, we stop asking questions and just start accepting things as they are. Without curiosity there is no learning, though. Here are some tips for "Learning to be curious" that I think hit the nail on the head (although I find it sad that we have to LEARN to be curious!)

• Access to resources and learning activities. One area that I think is really interesting is "micro-learning."  Without getting all technical about it, micro-learning is bite-size learning experiences that can be easily digested in a short period of time. A great example of this is 23 Things, which is a series of mini lessons to help staff learn about different Web 2.0 tools. Ideally, staff try to come up with their own ideas for learning activities they'd like to pursue. But an eagle-eyed manager might also keep an eye out for these kinds of activities to share.

• Access to learning tools and encouragement to use them. One of the reasons I love to blog is because it helps me learn--it's essentially a way to maintain an online learning journal complete with links to resources and tools that help me learn even more. Wikis, social bookmarking,  RSS and the work of others in my field that I can catch online also feed my daily learning fixes. Fortunately I work for myself and so I don't have to worry about a boss who decides to take these tools away from me. But other people do. To have a culture of learning, organizations need to consider if the benefits of arming staff with knowledge management tools don't outweigh the risks.

• An expectation that learning is something that happens on a daily basis on "company time." If learning is going to be part of an organizational culture, than it has to be woven into its fabric.Learning shouldn't be reserved for special training days. And it shouldn't be something that we expect always expect staff to do on their own time. My favorite organizations are those that have subscriptions to professional journals and pass them around the office with the expectation that staff will read them. My favorite bosses have always sent interesting articles my way. In a good learning organization, at the end of the day, not only should we be asking "What did you accomplish?" but we should also be wondering "What did you learn?" If the answer is "nothing," then we have a problem.

So a few of my thoughts. . . . what other elements do we need to create a climate that supports informal learning? And is creating such a climate really as critical as I think for nonprofit staff?

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UPDATE--Rallyfan of Random Thoughts on Life and Work adds another item to the list--giving staff a chance to actually USE the skills. He has a good post on this that you should also check out. 

Also, I've written a follow-up post describing two other strategies that I think are critical.

We Need More Passion for the Work, Not the Organization

Kathy Sierra, one of my favorite bloggers, posted the other day about passion at work. She argues that we shouldn't be asking employees to feel passionate about the organization they work for, but the work that they do.

What does it mean for me to be passionate about my work, as opposed to passionate about my organization?

A passion for work means that:

• I'm committed to principles of excellence and quality that are inherent to that profession, regardless of the organization for which I work.

• There are core skills and knowledge that are fundamental to me doing my work well and I do what I can to continually update my skills and knowledge so I'm the best at what I do.

• I feel a certain pride in the quality of the work that I do that, again, is not dependent on the organization where I'm working. Sadly, there are many organizations that do not put a premium on quality work, but for those who are passionate about what they do, it doesn't matter. Good work is its own reward.

• I am better able to work with my organization to continually improve what we do, at least in terms of the role that I play. Because I'm exposing myself to new ideas, new skills and new knowledge to do my job well, I will bring these things into the organization and be able to use them to always get better at what we do. In addition, because I'm committed first to my profession, I will tend to be more willing to challenge the organizational status quo when it doesn't support my ability to do my work well.

By comparison, Kathy argues that people who are passionate about the organization tend to exhibit these qualities:

• The ultimate team player who goes along with the group rather than voice dissent

• Works late nights and weekends because "everyone needs to pitch in on this project"

• Defends the company to anyone, anywhere that criticizes or questions its products, policies, or practices

• Puts responsibility to employer above responsibility to customers, without question

• Questions, but does not challenge the status quo

• Is well-liked because they do whatever is asked, enthusiastically

• Accepts (and uses) phrases like, "this is what corporate needs us to do."

• Cares a lot about his career path in the company; focused on getting management recognition.

While many of these seem like great traits to have in an employee, they are not necessarily the qualities that will actually improve an organization's performance. These people tend to be the "followers" not the leaders, the individuals who will not drive an organization to get better at what they do but to maintain the status quo. Probably the most damaging factor here is that these are the people who are committed to the organization, not to the customer. And without a commitment to the customer, your organization has a major problem.

To find out if someone is passionate about what they do, Kathy suggests a four-question test:

• When was the last time you read a trade/professional journal or book related to your work? (can substitute "attended an industry conference or took a course")

• Name at least two of the key people in your field.

• If you had to, would you spend your own money to buy tools or other materials that would improve the quality of your work?

• If you did not do this for work, would you still do it (or something related to it) as a hobby?

I love this test because when I think about the staff I know who are passionate about their work, they would all score well in these four areas. I also think that from a career development perspective, these are some good questions to ask yourself because they will tell you a lot about your feelings for your work.

Passion at work is critical. It drives and motivates like nothing else. The key, though, is to look more carefully at where that passion is directed. And I think Kathy's thoughts take us into some pretty good territory for evaluating where we are putting our passions.

Wiki-olio Anyone?

Beth Kanter is musing on her increased use of wikitations--wikis as presentation tools that either replace or build upon a PowerPoint presentation--and suggests that a wiki might also be a great place for her to keep an online portfolio. (I'm suggesting we call it a "wiki-olio" but I'm open to other suggestions).

Personally I think that a Wiki-based portfolio is a fabulous idea, particularly as I've been doing a lot of thinking about a professional development project I'm working on for one of my clients. (I also see this idea building off of some of my earlier thinking about building nonprofit skill networks.)

From an organizational perspective, having staff maintain an online portfolio with links to their work and presentations, resume information, etc. would be an outstanding resource. And for individuals, it would be a great way to keep an ongoing library of their work and skill development to be used throughout their careers. I don't know about you, but I've often forgot about projects I've worked on, trainings and presentations I've developed. If I got into the habit of maintaining a wiki-based portfolio, I'd have all of my work in one place.

For such a thing to work for organizations, I think that there would have to be an agreed-upon format and tagging taxonomy that all participants would use. The tags could cover skills, job functions, presentations/conferences, interests, work experiences, etc. It would make it much easier to find people who had a certain background or skill, particularly in larger organizations.

Definitely something I want to ponder further. I'd be curious to hear if anyone has created their own "wiki-olio" and what suggestions they have for organizing the materials, showcasing talents, etc.

Creating Nonprofit Skill Networks

Lately I've been exploring the concepts of nonprofit networks here, what it takes to form and nurture connections among various nonprofits and between nonprofits and individuals. We've talked about building connectivity networks that link people to people, affinity networks that reinforce commonalities among network members and production networks that move affinities into collective action.

The other day I was researching learning management systems for a client interested in tracking staff competences and training needs. I started thinking about the need for skill networks within the nonprofit community and what would have to happen in order for us to develop such networks.

What Do I Mean by a Nonprofit Skill Network?
Very simply, a nonprofit skill network would bring together the knowledge and skills of individual staff at all member organizations and make those skills available to the members of the network. For example, a staff person at Agency A might have skills in developing organizational newsletters. This skill would be cataloged in an online location--either a database or in some other form, such as through a wiki using tagging. When Agency B needs someone to do a newsletter for them, but they lack the internal skills for this to happen, then they would be able to find the staff person from Agency A who could then assist them in implementing that project. 

Why Do We Need Nonprofit Skill Networks?
Staff knowledge and skills are the lifeblood of any organization, but this is particularly true for nonprofits. The more skilled our staff are, the more access to good information they have, the more likely we are to be successful. But many nonprofits are small. They don't have the capacity within their individual organizations to cover all the skill needs that may be necessary to create an effective organization. This is particularly the case when we venture outside of traditional program areas into more functional skills, for example, IT, human resources, marketing and public relations, staff training etc.

With the creation of a skill network, member organizations would be able to expand their capacity to access particular knowledge and skills. In some cases, I could see organizations sharing a collective pool of staff. For example, Agency A might employ a marketing person who splits her time between several members of the network. Network members who used the marketing person would either reimburse the employing agency for the staff person's time or they could trade for services, perhaps offering the use of their finance person in return.

Agencies would also be able to access specialized skills and knowledge for special projects. For example, if an organization needed to run a training on case management basics, they might be able to "borrow" a staff person from one of the other organizations to provide the training. Again, they could either pay for the use of the staff person's time or they could trade for other services.

How Would a Skill Network Operate?
The first order of business would be to find a way to catalog the knowledge, skills and abilities of staff from all network member organizations. The network members would need to agree on a common taxonomy for describing skills so that member organizations are comparing apples to apples.

Ideally, these skills would be cataloged in an online system, either a shared database or by using something less sophisticated, such as tagging. If tagging was used, I could see the creation of a network wiki or blog. For each staff person there would be a detailed biography and maybe a copy of their resume, work samples, etc. Their entries would also be tagged with the appropriate knowledge and functions. Interested agencies would then be able to access the biographies by looking under the appropriate tags.

Other issues that would need to be addressed by the network would include:

• Processes and procedures for collecting the information from staff, including what information will be collected and how it will be shared.

• Will participation in the skill network be voluntary or required for individual staff?

• Processes for accessing staff from other agencies to work on various projects

• Acceptable exchanges--will trading be allowed or would it be strictly a financial arrangement? How will the organizations handle the financial side of things?

• Who will be responsible for maintaining and updating the skill database?

Cons of a Skill Network
There would be a number of challenges to creating such a skill network, not the least of which would be getting past the often siloed, territorial thinking of many organizations. Clearly this would be a complicated endeavor with logistical and practical concerns galore. Many organizations might be uncomfortable with the idea of hiring a staff person in the hopes that they would be able to share that person with other agencies and be reimbursed for those costs. (One way around that would be to look into sharing freelance consultants who would not be employed by any single agency). For various reasons, individual staff might also object to providing their services to another nonprofit. And a significant number of nonprofits operate in crisis mode, making the idea of setting up a skill network a pipe dream they feel they have little time to pursue.

Pros of a Skill Network
For all the potential problems in setting up and maintaining a skill network, I think that there are also significant benefits that make it a worthwhile endeavor. Clearly it would expand the capacity of individual organizations to provide higher quality services. They would have access to knowledge and skills beyond their organization that could give their individual organization a new lease on life.

There's also a benefit to individual staff. In many cases, nonprofit staff get burned out from dealing with the same people and problems on a daily basis. The opportunity to provide services in their strength areas to other organizations could re-energize a tired career. They could also give staff an opportunity to stretch and grow in ways that would in turn benefit their employing organization.

Some Possible First Steps
When I'm thinking about possibilities, I tend to take them to the furthest degree. I see the end result, which can be overwhelming to a lot of people. I think there are smaller steps that organizations could take, however, to start moving in the direction of a larger skill network.

Create an Internal Skill Network--The technologies exist for individual organizations to create their own internal knowledge and skill networks. Using wikis and blogs, individual organizations could take it upon themselves to catalog their internal staff knowledge and skills to make this information available to others in the organization. I would suggest delving deeply into what staff know--you may be surprised at the skills that people have developed in other parts of their lives that could be utilized within the organization.

Create a Skill Network with 1-2 Trusted Partners--Most nonprofits have developed relationships with other organizations already. To expand outside of the individual organization, they could reach out to a few of their trusted partners to build a smaller shared network of skills. You may already be doing this on an informal basis. However, making it a somewhat more structured process could reap bigger benefits for all members of the network. It could also create some major value-add for grant applications.

I think that there are a lot of possibilities for this concept and I'd love to hear from you about your thoughts, if you've seen anything like this being developed anywhere, etc. E-mail me or leave me a note in comments.

Michele

Playing To Your Staff's Strengths--Help them Develop a Career Plan

Yesterday, we talked about some great resources for identifying employee strengths and using them for more effective management. Today I want to follow up with some thoughts about how career planning can be used to make that process even more effective.

Why Should My Organization Care About My Employee's Career Plans?
When individuals prepare a career plan, they must start with an understanding of themselves. What are their values, passions and skills? What are their strengths that they can build on and what are their weaknesses that they need to manage around?

This process of self-discovery can provide two major benefits for the organization:

1. Staff and managers get a clear picture of the staff person that can be used to redesign work responsibilities and find new avenues for staff to explore. In many cases you get a renewed sense of commitment to the job and greater excitement about exploring learning opportunities and new responsibilities.
2. In some cases, people find out that they are really not well suited to the work they are currently doing. In my experience, the people who discover this are the ones who are considered to have "attitude problems" or to be "burnt out." On several occasions I've ended up counseling people out of their current professions and this has turned out to be a tremendous service both to the individual and to the organization that employed him/her.

Resources for Developing Staff Career Plans
In another post, I'll discuss a holistic process for working with staff to develop and implement their career plans. For now, I'm going to share a few resources that staff can use on their own or working with management.

Explore Values
Find Their Calling is a great article from Fast Company on how to identify and honor staff values. In most cases, job satisfaction and performance is tied to the extent to which the job and organization jibes with the worker's values. This article discusses how you can use this process with staff and describes some of the benefits.

Be Bold
The Be Bold Career Planning Journal is a nice piece geared specifically toward people in the nonprofit sector. Developed by the Be Bold Team,  this workbook helps staff:

• "Find their Truest Self"

• Identify their "Moment of Obligation" (what are their passions or sources of inspiration?)

• Develop the "gall to think big"

• Find Solutions that are New and Untested.

They also have an online quiz to help users figure out if they're "bold."

The advantage of this handy guide is that its focus on commitment and finding solutions can also fit in well with an organizational planning process. I'm a big believer in the idea that organizations run better when the goals of individuals are aligned with the goals of the organization. This provides a process for doing that.

If You Aren't Feeling Bold
Bold isn't for everyone, although I think it offers significant benefits when it comes to translating individual career plans into benefits for the organization. If it's not your style, though, you might want to have staff work their way through the Career Development e-Manual developed by the University of Waterloo. This great resource has been around for a while and provides step-by-step guidance for developing a plan.

We Want Your Feedback!
Drop us a line in the comments to let us know if your organization helps staff develop their own career plans. If you do, how's it working for you?

Michele

Playing to Your Staff's Strengths

Last week I did a training/planning session with one of my Job Corps clients. This group is responsible for attracting applicants to Job Corps and then helping them through the admissions process.

These two aspects of the job require very different skill sets. The outreach piece is essentially sales--staff must be able to go out to a variety of applicants and organizations and "sell" Job Corps. The admissions component of the job is more about counseling and preparing young people for the demands of a Job Corps education.

In the course of our planning, we got into a discussion about these two disparate job responsibilities. I asked how many in the group enjoyed the admissions/counseling piece. Two thirds of the group raised their hands. Then I asked who enjoyed the Outreach piece. One third raised their hands. And there was basically no overlap between the groups. They either liked outreach or they enjoyed admissions. Only one or two liked both.

"How many of you," I asked, "spend more time on the piece you enjoy and find that you do a better job at it?" They all raised their hands.

Later I was speaking to the manager of the department. He reported that he wasn't surprised at the results. The people who enjoyed counseling applicants were the ones who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing outreach. The outreach people, on the other hand, tended to not do as well with the applicants and their families.

"Why," I asked him, "do you then split the job this way. If you know you have a group of people who love and are good at doing outreach, why not have them doing that full-time, while the others are doing what they love and do well?"

It was like a lightening bolt had hit him. Like most organizations, his has defined jobs according to organizational needs, rather than the skills and talents of the workers. But as we talked, he began to realize that he would be able to better meet the needs of his organization if he worked WITH the strengths of his staff, rather than fighting their "weaknesses."

This is a common mistake at most organizations. Even those nonprofits that specialize in helping clients with career and job search plans do nothing to ensure that their own staff have a career plan that clearly identifies their strengths. Further, even if they do, little is done to actually capitalize on those strengths.

I've come to believe, though, that if we tap into staff passions and strong points we can actually boost our organizational performance in ways we never imagined. When people love what they do and feel like they're doing what they are good at, they will naturally become your top performers. In many cases this can happen by accident, but why not be more deliberate about it?

Resources for Managing to Staff Strengths
If you're going to explore how to manage to staff strengths, your education should begin with First Break All the Rules (if you don't have time for the book, then at least try this summary). Then follow it up with Now Discover Your Strengths, which includes a free code for taking the online Strengths Finder to discover your own personal strengths.

These two books by Marcus Buckingham describe in easy-to-read terms how successful, high performing managers help their staff identify key strengths and then structure the employee's job responsibilities to capitalize on these strengths and minimize weaknesses. They give explicit step-by-step instructions that can be used by any organization to get the most out of their staff, something I think is key for many nonprofits.

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Tomorrow, I'm going to talk in some more detail on how to use a career planning process to engage staff and management in talking about strengths and engaging them in what their areas of passion. This is another way to approach the strengths process that I think is also very in line with some key themes of the 2.0 revolution.

Michele