Week 8 was filled with learning about leadership styles, what leadership means for nonprofits (or, “social profit”) organizations. It was interesting to see that the theme of leadership styles and definitions of leadership also came up during my weekly meeting with the development team. Since we officially have a full team for Development, our senior leaders took time to talk about what their leadership style looks like and how that affects their own expectations and interactions with the rest of the team. The new members (the new Development Manager and myself) now are tasked with taking a leadership strengths test to find out our own individual leadership styles. This will help us gauge how to best work with each other and where we all will need to work to make this team stronger moving forward.

On Wednesday, our Learning Session discussion with Elizabeth Martinez (Big Brothers Big Sisters) and Nick Jones (Nationwide Children’s Hospital) also tackled the topic of leadership and succession planning. Plenty of aspects of this conversation remained with me throughout the rest of the week. For one, this idea from Elizabeth Martinez that nonprofits are actually “social profit” organizations stood out since it is a different perspective to have about the work that organizations like City Year and more bring to the community and society at-large. As Dr. Lomax pointed out, it pushes against certain capitalistic ideals of what constitutes profit and instead brings the idea that working for larger societal benefits is also another version of “profit”.

Yet another part of this conversation that stayed with me for the week was the idea that succession planning in social profit organizations are often done from a crisis mode as opposed to a proactive and planning mode. Instead of scrambling to ensure that proper or ideal leaders are stepping up when others leave, we should be proactive in thinking about the longer term of the organizations.

As a final note for this week, I did want to talk about self-care. Part of the struggle with Week 8 was that I was sick for three of the five days of the week and was not able to work to the best of my ability. Although I was frustrated on having to miss work and the constant messages I had to send my supervisor that I couldn’t work, I also realize that this has to be part of my own style of leadership. It’s taken me a bit but I do realize that I have to take care of myself and really take care of others, especially since getting sick during a pandemic is more nerve-wracking and could be potentially dangerous for not only myself but others. This is all to say—self-care is important and should be significant part of consideration in all of our leadership styles.