Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Get ready for a powerful story of leadership and resilience. Join us as we host Beth Napleton, the powerhouse educator and coach, changing lives from Chicago’s classrooms to executive boardrooms. How does she do it all, including raising three kids? Find out on this episode.

Beth Napleton: How do I do it all? I want to know.

David Pisarek: I’m going to ask you, so here we go!

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. I’m your host, David. In this episode, we’re going to be talking all things about creating a functional and goal-oriented team. I’ve got Beth Napleton here.

Beth is a celebrated educator and leadership coach known for her transformative work in the education field spanning over 20 years. Beth is an alumni of Columbia University and Teach for America. Is a founder of a game-changing charter school network in Chicago’s South Side, renowned for guiding every one of its graduates to college acceptance.

She’s also a certified Clifton Gallop Strengths coach, using her own podcast, “Live on Leadership with Beth Napleton” and other platforms to empower leaders to unlock their potential. And the cherry on top, she’s a super mom, single-handedly raising three amazing children, juggling this career with single-parenthood. Beth, how do you find the balance? Managing your professional responsibilities while raising three kids?

Beth Napleton: That probably is its podcast topic in and of itself. But I will say that taking it day by day is very helpful. Don’t look ahead to the week or the month of the year, just the day ahead of you. Starting my day with meditation and a little exercise, and then a healthy dose of caffeine throughout the day is really important to give me the energy to keep up, particularly with the eight-year-old twin boys.

David Pisarek: I couldn’t imagine twins. I have an eight-year-old boy. I couldn’t imagine two of them, super fun and exciting and active and all that amazingness that does happen. So kudos. One of the things I wanted to ask you is what’s the most rewarding aspect of your work as an executive coach?

Beth Napleton: I love working with leaders because I think that when you think about any organization, whether it’s a school or a district or a non-profit, any one of us has limited time and energy and it’s like, “Where do you put that?” I love investing my time with leaders because it’s like a giant domino line, and that’s the I don’t know if you can tip that, it affects their team, the people who report to their team, the constituents, the stakeholders, the funders, the community organizers.

I think that it’s super rewarding to work with leaders because they are that crucial pivot point in an organization. Often they don’t see themselves that way. They’ll say, “Oh, no, it’s my chief of staff. Oh, no, it’s my chief development officer.”

But when you look at who sets the tone when you look at who inspires people when you look at who… I mean, particularly these last few years coming out of COVID, who really helped rally people and keep spirits up even in the times of difficulty, it’s leaders. I find that they’re not afraid to get in the ring to rumble with the issues to figure out what’s going on, but it can be really lonely and really isolating.

It’s gratifying for me to be able to work with them because all of my perspectives and experiences over the past 20-plus years have shown me that, actually, that’s just how teams go. This is actually just part of the normal growing pain.

Actually, these are super normal issues to have when your leadership team is a little greener than you would like it to be. Let’s talk about how we can acclimate them quickly. I like that I can help relieve that sense of isolation and loneliness that comes with leadership and also just make such a big difference in a short time in an organization.

David Pisarek: 100%. It’s important and impactful to know that you’re not alone in this. Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you’re experiencing, there are hundreds or thousands or millions of people who have gone through that before. Let’s take this knowledge. Let’s connect.

Beth Napleton: I’ve seen the teams all the time. That’s one of the things that’s so interesting about my work is I’ll be talking with someone on a Tuesday and it’s like, well, actually, we’re talking on Monday afternoon and then last Thursday morning.

Some of this stuff can be really helpful for leaders. It isn’t just me. They bring to me that if we’re doing executive coaching, they’re often getting to me the challenges they feel like they can’t talk about with anyone on their team or their spouse is tired of hearing about. The thing that’s keeping them up at night.

To be able to be like, “Oh, this is actually there’s definitely something in the air right now because this is coming up across the board” can be really just like a relief to know “It’s not just me.” I think it’s human.

We sometimes think like, “Oh, my gosh, it’s like a failure of my leadership. Is it because I’m not doing X and Y right?” Well, look, there are a lot of macro changes happening in the world right now. Our organizations and our people feel those the same way that anyone would.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. When we think of leadership in non-profits, what do you see as some misconceptions people have about leadership?

Beth Napleton: Yeah, I always used to say that the view is easy from the cheap seats.

People would say, “Oh, if I were in the organization, I would do X and Y differently, and I would do this and I would do that.” It’s just the same way that I could sit in a baseball game at Wrigley Field and talk about what I would do differently on the field.

I’m not dealing with the primadonna pitcher and the general manager’s pressures and all of those. When you sit in the leader’s seat, it’s challenging.

You appreciate that when things get you, they’re usually reasonably thorny or somebody else has not wanted to make the decision that clearly needs to happen. I think that a lot of people go into leadership thinking about, “This is what I can do to say yes to things. I can say yes and green light.” But quickly, when you do that as a leader, you can start to realize that we now have a million initiatives and where is our time to go? And what’s most important?

Really, so much about leadership is about saying no, about saying, “These are the three things we’re going to focus on. These are our goals for this year. This is how it connects the mission. I appreciate that idea. Let’s file away for next year. Let’s revisit it.”

I think that one of the misconceptions about leadership is that it’s easy, that it’s so privileged, that it’s so great. They’re often nice perks that come with it. The office or get to go to the gallery or the fundraiser or whatever it is.

They also get the thorny issues and the HR things that you’re like, “They did what? This person did what? What are you telling me? Do I have to deal with this? This is ridiculous.” I think that that really can be a transition. There is a time that I see as part of that learning curve and adaptation where people are really like, “Oh, my gosh, I never saw this side. All those confidential HR issues I never had insight into as the deputy director or the assistant director. Now all of a sudden they’re coming to my desk and I am like, What in the world is going on with humanity?”

David Pisarek: Leaders have responsibilities that they need to take on. I think that’s really what you’re talking about, is driving forward, understanding what’s going on.

If an organization is in need of funding for a specific thing, maybe the leader management team, the C-suite, whatever, maybe they’re taking that on or the board is taking these things on because they don’t want the people to worry. Because the people in teams do amazing work, let’s keep them doing their amazing work and we’re going to deal with this at this level.

Beth Napleton: Right? I think a lot of times that is part of what leaders do is “How do I keep these concerns up here so that people who work for me can focus on the mission and focus on our clients?” I think that that is part of the burden of leadership, which is really important.

That is why getting a coach or having some extra capacity through a consultant and having a good relationship with your board can be so important because chances are that whatever is weighing you down, you are not the first organization ever to experience this. Somebody else probably is experiencing it down the block or in the next sector.

Sometimes those peer relationships can also be helpful with other executive directors or other CEOs. Other times people can say, “Well, it makes my organization look bad. Does it make me look bad?” That’s where there’s value in having a coach or someone that you can talk to in a private setting because it’s like Vegas: What happens there, stay there. Even just think aloud and think about, “Well, what if we did this?” Or, “What if we did that?” Because if you have that conversation in a staff meeting, people freak out.

“What if we did this?” So it’s like, “Okay, I have to keep this higher level thinking and do some of that before I come to you and say, Hey, here’s the plan.” A level of leaders getting their own clarity on what they think and what’s important what’s off the table and what should be considered. That time to think and nurture these seeds of ideas. But that is where getting a coach or having someone outside can be helpful to allow you to spend a little bit of time on those issues.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. I’m glad you made that transition because what we were talking about is a little bit dark topic stuff like “We’ve got problems,” whatever. But coming out with ideas, brainstorming, that type of thing, how do you help non-profit leaders get their ideas onto paper, develop plans, and have a really strong foundation to create action steps?

Beth Napleton: Yeah. One of my favourite kinds of work that I do with leaders, I call Coachsulting because it’s a blend of coaching and consulting.

I always say in coaching, you come with the agenda and do leave with the to-do list. In consulting, the consulting comes with the agenda and the consultant leaves with the to-do list. It’s a blend of these two where it’s saying, a leader often comes to me with a problem.

For example, I was talking with a leader yesterday who founded a very successful organization to promote nonviolence and youth in Chicago, and she is thinking about her succession, which is probably 3-5 years down the road and we need to be sure with her board and funders and the program to be able to ensure that she can retire. This Coachsulting, is the perfect fit for that because it allows us to do the three main steps.

One is I always do a comprehensive current state analysis. That’s very consultancy of me. I’ll do interviews and focus groups and surveys and case studies and get a lay of the land both at the organization and with comparable organizations. Then we really spend some time planning and focusing where we say, “Okay, so given all these factors, what do you think is most important? What should we consider? Let’s make a plan.”

Many consultants will leave you there and they hand you a plan and usually a very fancy deck and say, “Good luck” to you. As the ED of a small charter network for many years, I had many great plans that would sometimes gather dust because as soon as we implemented it, the external factors changed, or there was community pushback, or this key stakeholder didn’t like it. It can be like, “You know what? I’m just going to file this away because this can’t happen. Those consultants were smart, but that actually is not going to get us where we need to go.” That’s where the third step of the consulting process comes in, which is implementation support for that plan.

Whether that is like drafting communication to go to the board, whether it is just rehearsing that difficult conversation that you know is going to come with that crucial stakeholder about this issue. Really, we work together usually over about a 3-6-month period and go through these phases so that we’re able to kick it off; I’m able to support them through this process. We’re able to start to bring it out into the world.

Sometimes the engagement on there, and sometimes we say, “Great, now I have a succession plan, and I feel good, and I’ve invested people. Now we identify one of the key pieces is we need to get the board really up to speed and a little bit more muscular. Now let’s go with that.”

What I like about this is that leaders can bring me a storny, sometimes, amorphous challenge. I need to have our culture be more feedback-welcoming. I want to make sure that we’re able to grow and scale in a year when we start to think about it and say, “How do we look at the challenge here and come up with this Coachsulty project. That is a really impactful way to see some transformation in an organization.

David Pisarek: It’s important to build the foundational pieces. Going, “Okay, this is the goal. This is the one-year goal, the three, the five, the 10-year vision.” Then you can start building the plan, getting the foundation pieces in place, connecting, and doing whatever research needs to happen, whether it’s you or you hire a consultant. Understanding what needs to happen in order to get to that goal and breaking it down into individual steps.

I love that you’re talking with them about implementation. It’s one thing to have a great, wonderful, amazing idea. How do you actually get there? Where does Clifton-Gallop’s Strengths assessment come in with all this?

Beth Napleton: I became a Clifton-Gallop Strengths coach after using a bootleg version for many years when I was the CEO of a small charter network. I had done the assessment earlier in my career when I worked on the Teach for America National team. I really liked it. I would take the book and make up these trainings and sessions, and we talk about our strengths, and they were always really successful.

I don’t know if you like those kinds of… I love a good Fire Springs or Color Tests. Yes. Okay. Then this is for you. You will love it. They say it takes an hour. I don’t think it’s that long, and it’ll ask you a series of questions and which one you more strongly agree with. I think the idea behind the strengths assessment is that Gallup started doing a bunch of research in the 1950s, and they were trying to discover how some people had certain proclivities or aptitudes that others didn’t.

What they discovered is that you were born with these talents. Then, when you nurture them, they become strengths.

There’s a mix of nature and nurture. There’s a mix of the dynamic that you grew up with. There’s a mix of when you use a muscle, it gets stronger, just like your strengths.

What I love about it is that as humans, we are so hardwired to think about what’s wrong with us. This is probably how we survived evolutionarily. It’s been like we were focused on deficits and trying to outrun the wooly mammoth or whatever. But we bring that into our everyday lives and it’s not super productive to sit and think, “Oh, I should do this differently. Oh, I was too wordy. Or, I should have done that.” We also have things that we do really well and we often sell ourselves short on them or we think that everybody can do it well or it just comes so easily.

What Gallup does and the assessment does is help you take this and say, “Okay, here are my top five strengths. How do they show up in my work? How can I use these? How do they help me think about how I can best tackle this problem?” Then you can also do it with your team. It’s great to do it with teams because everyone speaks of common language and can say “This is something we have in common.”

What people often find is that a few things. Number one, of the top three strengths, there is almost always a sense of clients like, “Well, this comes easily to everyone.” That’s just how people do it because it’s just so natural to them that they feel like this is exactly it. It’s helpful as a coach to sit there and go through these individual sessions, which I weave into the Coachsulty or Executive Coach.

I do some one-off strengths coaching sessions or I’ll do some strengths PD, but we’ll talk about it. It’s actually not. My number one strength is activator. It is a strength that it’s about darting and enthusiasm and getting ready to roll. I have started a school, I’ve started a non-profit, I’ve started a program, and I started a business. This clearly makes sense to me. I think, “Well, who is not excited about starting this?” Many people aren’t excited. Actually, one of those strengths they contrast it to is the strength called deliberative. There is no one right set of strengths to be an executive director or a leader.

There are lots of different ways to be successful. The most important thing is that you know what your strengths are and you consider those when you’re tackling your challenge.

I have a client, Christina, who is the principal of an alternative high school in Indianapolis, and she is extremely strategic. We know that for any problem she’s going to tackle, she can pull up to 20,000 sqft, look at the different options, and think about how to approach them and the way that that goes through.

I have another client who is an executive director of a Jewish community center in a major urban city in the United States, and she has activated, like me, her number one strength. We know that she brings that on her due to that’s how she’s really good at starting stuff. That also helps us see the shadow a little bit of what’s happening. “One thing was starting right away is you don’t always think about what’s 5-10 are. You’re really good at steps 1-4. Okay, let’s think about that. Let’s plan for that.” Let’s think about how to leverage other people’s strengths or how to build and checks around ourselves so that we don’t inadvertently go off to the races and then say, “Wait a second, where are we heading?”

David Pisarek: Very cool. Thinking about as a non-profit leader, how can we invest in ourselves?

Beth Napleton: I think that it’s so important, and I’ve heard you say before in your show, you have to think about running your non-profit like you run a business. I think that I am 10,000% behind that.

One thing that I see in non-profit leaders is if you say to them, “Hey, this super-valued employee wants to go to this conference or go to this train of thought.” Of course. Then you say to the CEO, “Well, we used to go to this conference. Oh, we could do this somewhere else. Oh, I don’t need a coach. I can do this. I should be able to.”

I think we need to get rid of the word “should.” It’s always a problematic word. You need to think about this simply as a business issue. The leader is the most impactful person in my organization and is a great place to direct my resources.

If I can help their skills improve, then imagine what that means for all of the people who work under them, whether that’s five people 50 people or 500 people. I think that there is a huge return on investment when leaders invest in themselves. But it often requires leaders to get over this hurdle of thinking about, “Well, this money could be used someplace else,” especially in non-profits.

People think, “Oh, we could serve this many more meals to our unhoused population. We could have this many more books for our kid.” I get it. There’s this scarcity mindset. We’re worried about this, “Where is the next dollar coming in?” But one of the best ways we can increase our efficacy towards our mission is by investing in ourselves, whether it’s with a coach or conferences or continuing education and stop expecting ourselves to be able to do all parts of our job equally well. Because we’re humans we bring different strengths and then opportunities for growth as well.

David Pisarek: Your time is super valuable. There are different types of tasks that, as leaders of organizations, we need to think about. You have $10,000, $1,000, $100, $10 an hour type of work. Not that it’s wrong; whatever stage people are working at, that’s what they’re working at. But let’s get you the support so that you don’t have to necessarily be doing everything yourself so that you can take the time and you can focus on the thing that will drive your organization forward.

Beth Napleton: Absolutely. I think we’re all guilty of the, “I’ll get the book in front of the course.” I think it’s a staircase. Then I think, “Can I spare the time to go to the workshop or the course?” I think also leaders sometimes say what I find for my consultant half, for some of the consulting work I do is, “Well, I could do it, so why should I hire someone else to do it?” Because you have limited time in the day, and is this where you actually should be spending your time.

When you’re bringing in a consultant in, you’re not just bringing in the extra set of hands and their time; you’re also bringing in, for me, 25 years of working through leadership challenges and working with teams. When they bring you in, you have the digital experience, the branding, all these pieces that you’re not going to get. 10 hours of the CEO’s time is not equal to 10 hours of my time because I bring all that experience, and it makes it faster. It’s what I do every day.

David Pisarek: Okay, so let’s end on this. What are the two secrets to being a successful leader?

Beth Napleton: I would say one of them we’ve touched on already, which I think is so important, is that you have to invest in yourself. I think this can make leaders uncomfortable and can bring up lots of questions. But you have to work through that and get over it because I work a lot with school leaders. You need a great principal, period, full stop.

Then I think the other piece that is really important is that you need to really be yourself as a leader.

I often find, particularly when I’m working with leaders who are newer to their role, like, “Oh, that’s what a CEO should do.” It’s like, look, what do you do? What really feels authentic to you and what can you do as a leader so that you can thrive in that way? If you really work to fit yourself into something that’s like getting yourself into an outfit where you have to suck in your gut to button the pants, you’re not going to be able to wear that outfit for the long haul. You need to be in something that is comfortable, and that fits you. I think really thinking about how to really be your most authentic self as a leader is really important for long-term success.

David Pisarek: The organization hired you for the role that you’re in. Okay, so let’s digest that for a second. They hired YOU, not what they think you should be.

Beth Napleton: Yes. Often, the reason that they hire you is because the board sees a need. “We need somebody who is going to be… Really get our internal operation in order. Our last person was great externally, but we need to really get our internal house in order.” They’re actually often making a deliberate hire away from the previous leader to shift that pendulum a little bit more in a different direction.

You should be different, and it should feel different, and that is deliberate. I think that is so important for leaders to remind themselves of this at all points.

David Pisarek: Beth, amazing insights around growth and leadership and creating functional, goal-oriented teams and organizations. I hope people listening to the episode have gotten some really great advice. I know I have, for sure, some amazing pointers.

What I’d love is if you could issue a challenge to everybody, something that they should do or think about or take action in the next, maybe, two or three days after listening to this.

Beth Napleton: Yeah. I think to our point earlier, leaders are always thinking about “What does my team need or what do others need?”

I want leaders to take two minutes in the next two days to go to leadership-quiz.com. It’ll redirect you to my website. It has a quiz at the top that’s two minutes, that’s about what you need most as a leader. Take two minutes to take this quiz so that you can say, “Hey, this is actually what I need, and that matters too.” That saying that you can’t take care of others until you take care of yourself.

If you’re in a parrot on the airplane, put your oxygen mask on before you put your kid’s oxygen mask on. It’s the same thing with leadership, and I think we need to apply that.

That is my challenge to your listeners to spend literally a two-minute quiz.

David Pisarek: Awesome. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, connect, get a consult, hire you, whatever. What do they need to do?

Beth Napleton: Absolutely. They can go to my website, which will be in the show notes, bethnapleton.com. There’s a spot right there and a book and intro call. I always encourage leaders. It’s a phone call, it’s not a Zoom, and we just talk. You can do it on your commute, you could do it on your job, whatever. You’re picking up your kid from camp, whatever it is. Whether or not we work together, it’s usually a very helpful way to crystallize like, “Here’s what my issue is and here’s what I need help with.”

It is a little glimpse of that valuable outside perspective and ear that leaders often get in that piece. I would definitely encourage any of your listeners interested to go to bethnapleton.com and book a call and check out my resources. I have a blog, I have videos, I put a self-care calendar, all kinds of things on there.

David Pisarek: Definitely check it out. Amazing. Thanks again so much, Beth. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast.

To everybody listening, as Beth mentioned, if you want any of the links or resources, just head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details. Until next time, keep on being successful.