Episode 265: Dealing with Adversity for an Organization, And my Favorite Saying
It's another fabulous day right here on this edition of Around with Randall. As we begin to move into 2026 and some of the things that we've talked about over the last 2 or 3 of the episodes, particularly with Prediction Show and episode 262 for the year. This means a moment where nonprofits and philanthropy is going to have to deal with adversity.
That's what I want to talk about today. Maybe not the tactical things that are going to be applicable in terms of, hey, we're going to execute this major gift plan or this annual giving plan or plan giving effort, but about how your organization and you can deal with adversity. Back on episode 67, I dealt with it from a little bit different perspective.
This time, I want to deal with it from the standpoint of the things that your organization can do, as it maybe works through some bumps in the road challenges that are really part of the cycle, that I'm seeing more and more with the nonprofits I have the privilege of working with. I want to start with where this all stemmed from.
Received an email from Jordan in Denver asking listener, which I appreciate anyone who listens. My one listener, I guess, but Jordan asks the question that I always end with the same saying and why. And that saying is you'll hear it once here and then maybe once at the end. The old Gaelic one. Some he'll make things happen, some people watch things happen.
Then there are those who wondered what happened. His question was where does that come from? And literally two days later, one of my dearest friends in the world, someone that I trust, implicitly used the name of the person that I first heard it from 25 years ago. Which brings me to kind of piecing together. I'm not sure it's providential, but at least some signs that we're going to talk about this.
I first heard of the old Gaelic saying from a hero of mine, not quite to the level of my father by any stretch. The only man I really ever wanted to be. But in terms of someone that was in the outside world, someone I looked up to, someone like an Abraham Lincoln or a George Washington, as I've read about them.
This individual's name was Jim Lovell. Some may know, some may not. But Jim Lovell was United States NASA astronaut and most famously, was the commander of the Apollo 13 mission. The role that Tom Hanks played in the movie that famously had the explosion in space on its way to the moon and had to circle the moon and come back.
I heard Jim Lovell at a conference once speak, and he certainly didn't use the saying as much as I do, but he mentioned it, and that in his mind that when we walk into or have thrust upon us adversity, we have choices. And he wasn't speaking about in the Gaelic saying doesn't reflect the choices of what we if we do A, we do B, we do C to paraphrase, and we're going to steal from a space metaphor kind of episode here, The Martian, where we have the conversation around, which was Ridley Scott's great movie around the thought process.
As was said at the very end of the movie, you do one, you do 2 to 3. What Jim Lovell was talking about was more of a psychological. Some people make things happen, watch things happen. Then one. Then there are those who wonder what happened is do you choose to act, or do you just sit back and watch?
Do you not care that there are makers, watchers and wanderers and that when adversity hits the true choice at least the first of many choices is to choose to choose to do something about it, not to accept that there is a chance and we with the right plan, a plausibility, that we can make this scenario better. On top of all of this, if you know me personally, you would be aware of this.
I recently went through my second knee replacement in six months between football and athletics and life. I needed two knee replacements. There's very much this Gaelic saying in my recovery in both, but more particularly in the second. In that I lost mobility, I lost independence, basically, my wife had to adopt the third child. That's referring to me because I'm in a recliner.
I can't feed myself. For the most part, it's just challenging to get up, go to the bathroom, let alone actually do anything. My kids are running and getting ice for the machine. It's an unglamorous, slow recovery. Now, fortunately, in both cases, I'm incredibly blessed to have an amazing surgeon and a phenomenal physical therapist and was brought up to believe that these people are experts and I should do what they tell me.
So I've done exactly that. But what I've realized when you put all of this together is, is that the adversity that I felt was fold. It was a choice of doing something, watching something, or just wondering. And I wasn't going to sit and watch or wonder. I had to do my exercise and go to physical therapy. I do choose to engage discomfort, pain, a realization that progress comes in inches, not in milestones.
That there's frustration that there are setbacks and it's not a linear progression.
That all of this also moves into not only the physical, but the mental and the emotional. We happened to do the second one over the holidays, and there I am at, you know, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I can't up my wife with anything, with presents, with food, with she's left holding everything. That's an emotional guilt. And if you don't think I bought my wife's love this Christmas, which is a terrible phrase and saying, you don't understand that.
You don't understand me. I owe my family, my mother, my sisters who called and were showing up, and certainly my kids and my wife and men, some out.
Adversity comes in many different forms. For me recently it was this dealing with the me and I'm progressing through it. If you go back and listen to episode 1 or 262, excuse me of the predictions for 2026, I hit upon some of the things I think are going to happen, and I've been very lucky to be running at 80% or higher when I make these predictions at the beginning of the next or beginning into the next year, we're going to be dealing with things like leadership transition.
I'm watching and something mentioned in that particular podcast, but man, are we seeing a lot of turnover. We're dealing with donor fatigue and certainly the uncertainty of where we are in the 95, 97, 95, five, 97, three world where fewer people are making a bigger difference. We're having staffing gaps because of budget issues and certainly burnout. And we also probably don't have the talent set.
We need to replace those that are retiring after years of dedication and leadership, technology and I and I pressures. Things are changing quickly. We also know that there's revenue volatility that we're having. If you're in health care education, kind of two of the bigger areas. But certainly out there when the religious sector of the nonprofit world changes in this volatility, as we are in kind of an economic uncertainty, I keep talking about this k economy recovery or k economy.
Those who have resources are doing fairly well. The markets are really up. People at the top end are doing okay. The problem is like the K breaks up and down. We have a lot of people that are really struggling with inflation and the numbers some months look pretty good generically or you know conservative across the country. Some months they look bad.
And I don't think anybody's got a real finger on what's going on. Then we have this continuation of reduction of donors and our annual giving cycles. And what I'm noticing more and more often, we'll talk about this in the tactical here in a moment about how do we get some positive direction is, is that we have kind of a lack of strategy amongst a lot of boards and leaders.
We're like the little boy in the dike plugging holes and sort of figuring out how do we rebuild the wall and maybe make it look different to last longer that the nonprofit equivalents of my recovery or injury or surgery is that doing things right takes time. It doesn't come quickly, and that there's a frustration or a impatience that comes, and that capacity or the need for it can be a constraint because we may not have it.
It may mean that we have to look at other options. I also think it's important to realize when we deal with adversity as an organization, is, is that transitioning or treating this moment as transition and looking at it as a temporary inconvenience is terribly defeating to what we need to accomplish, because it may mean we need to look at structural change to be who and what we want to be.
We'll talk about that in the tactical outcomes as well. All this to say is, is that this may not be a pause. Adversity that we're sensing of all the things I just labeled no different than my knee. It's a pivot point I may not be able to. And at 55, I'm not assuming I'll be able to run like an 18 year old.
Well, I may not be able to do the same things, but am I going to accept that or engage in ways and finding to do the things I want to do in different ways? I'm going to stop coaching my kids teams. Hell no. But I might have to do it differently, particularly in the short run, because it's it's challenging going to basketball games with my son or going up to watch the high school team, or watching my kids play or taking walks with my wife.
It may be a little different, but I'm not giving up on what I love. The same is true of our nonprofits that this isn't not a pause, but a pivot. If we pivot to what's right. Which brings us to our tactical. The rest of the time today, as I do every episode, I want to talk about six things that we can do as organizations.
And you can parlay this into individual if you want. I think there's probably a lot of carryover and connection into tactile things that make it better. Six so let's start at the top. Number one is to be honest and name the reality early. Too often organizations put their head in the sand and they avoid the realization, or at least the recognition that there's a problem.
The longer you wait, the more challenging it becomes. I have a client who I'm working with, a very interesting and in some way in my past, dealt with admissions and they asked because I've done some other work with them, can I help them with some admissions? And I ran this incredible for so much fun, which says a lot about me.
Data analysis of all of their students enrollment figures over the last five years and what's going on, and then overlay that with finance and what they're doing. And what I came out in the report was to say that you have these seven options today. If you wait 18 months, you're going to have four options. And if you wait three years, you may only have 1 or 2.
If you aren't willing to work into the problem and talk about it now in clear language, avoiding unrealistic optimism that will destroy, by the way, when people sense it, trust internally and externally to be realistic so there's no surprises to deal with the situation. The more options you have, and you'll hear this throughout, I believe, and this is something I do when I mentor, coach, or just deal with, as many people as I can who ask my advice, they must be crazy to do so, but they seem to do it a lot.
I always talk about options. How do you create options for yourself? Because the more options you have, the better choice you'll make. If you only have one option, there is no choice. So the first thing is, is to be honest and be looking at the situation in a real sense of calmness, but a sense of reality and be open to it.
Number two is to separate the idea of effort with effectiveness. What do I mean by that? That when we have adversity, sometimes it's not okay just to say, well, I'm working really hard at it. Instead of creating measurable ways to find out if we're adjusting to what the situation demands. John Wooden, one of my all time favorites. One of those talked about it, you know, from a gym level perspective, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington.
John Wooden's another one of my favorite kind of non personal heroes. Somebody I read about and looked up to in terms of what he did in his life. The all time NCAA winningest championship coach at UCLA, winning ten of 11 championships from 1964 to 1975. One of the things he had was his pyramid of success, and one of the things in that pyramid of success, and if you've heard me speak before, you probably you've heard me say this.
He said, don't confuse activity with accomplishment or achievement. Just because we're doing something doesn't mean it's actually the right thing to do. Nor is it okay to say, well, we're working really hard at it without having achievement. Activity is not the same thing as impact. So that means we have to stop measuring busyness and start measuring traction.
Meaning are we moving toward what we need to do, which can be painful because when we measure busyness, it what we get is a lot less friction, particularly if the busyness actually isn't leading to any change or adjustment.
Growth positive outcomes comes from discomfort, which means we need to find ways of measuring it going all the way back to my knee. I know when I'm doing the right things, because when I come home from physical therapy or at the end of the day, or at the beginning of the day when I do my exercises and there's a slight bit of discomfort in my legs, the right kind of discomfort, it tells me I'm doing the right things.
And surprisingly, 2 or 3 days later, there seems to be less of it. We have to be willing to be effective, not just measure effort. Three is shorten the planning horizon and I'm going to use number six is dealing with strategy. But here I want to talk for just a minute about that. Depending on the level of adversity will really predict and or drive the amount of time that you need to create clarity.
If it's in a immense emergency, it's 20, 30 days max, maybe ten, because we got to make huge adjustments. If it's something we see far enough ahead, we're willing to do. Number one, admit that reality, then we have may have more time, which means we have the option of maybe looking at 90, 220 days, or if we need to make changes over several, let's say two years.
It may be a series of steps, but here are the questions to ask to figure out where you're at and how much time you have. What is it we must stable and how critical is it? What can wait that we're currently doing? That may not be. And I just had this conversation with a client yesterday where I literally was like, we're doing this.
I said, you need to put these three things on hold. One of which was like an accounting issue. And I said, you have political issues you have to deal with to get through this challenge. That is not I mean, it wasn't against Facebook or GAAP or, you know, the Cubo, if they just wanted a minute. The CFO was like, well, this would be great.
I'm like, yeah, but the CFO don't have to deal with the issue like the president would like politically with the board. And why do these numbers look differently? So what can wait? What can we stop so we can put our efforts into the things that need the most immediate attention? And then how destabilizing they are becomes the question of how long you have to deal with it.
Ten days, 30 days, 90 days, two years. And by the way, you might have multiple plans in each one of those timeframes. So shorten your planning window to deal with what you have to deal with in the moment, what the biggest piece of adversity is. And by the way, my knee. I stop working for a month. If you know me at all, that's not easy.
I like what I do, I hope I'm of value to my clients. I'm very lucky. I don't do a lot of advertising. They seem to find me and I love the privilege of serving them. Taking me out of that for a month is part, but that needs to go because I got to worry about my knee and, you know, just functioning for invest in recovery, not in performance.
This is really dealing with our staffs, our most precious but limited resource that we're going to need people to make change. So we have to find ways of creating what I would think of as pace. How do we do this meaningfully? And in doing so, do we need to bring in someone or do we need to make a change?
I have a client who I'm dealing with, who's making some changes and what they're what they're trying to accomplish. And what we talked about was finding an interim person to be a kind of a high-level leader, not necessarily the executive or CEO, but to oversee a department that is struggling because it wasn't going to happen unless they needed more talent.
They needed it. It's an investment. Yes, it costs some money, but they're already seeing the ramifications or the positive outcomes of that. So, the first is, is that normalizing pacing, meaning can we evaluate talent or bandwidth? The second thing is, is we don't want to force guilt. We've got to make these changes. If we don't, it's because you didn't work and we didn't.
You can't force guilt, because what happens in guilt is you end up in a scenario where you end up pushing people out. They'll walk away from that. So, invest in the recovery, meaning your people, the people that can make the change and do so in a the most positive way possible without any guilt about who needs to do what.
Number five is to communicate more, not less. You have responsibilities and organization with you. Our name, the reality. If you talk about effectiveness, if you look at it in the short and long term, it's horizons and you have that. You have to be honest and do not tolerate silence. You have to address exactly what needs to be done, how to do it, why it might.
You have to be consistent and not look for perfection in that communication. In doing so, what you'll do is create trust.
And at the end of the day, that trust will take you a long ways to people's willingness to adjust. The last is I mentioned is the top. Certainly you want to create a shortened planning horizon, but at some point you're going to have to go back to strategy. I'm sensing so many boards are and leaders are so operational, and I keep pushing.
And I just did a great it was so much fun strategic planning session where I'm lifting that board over the course of a few months, and they're planning sessions out of the operations, where all of a sudden they were talking about, what do we want to be in a year, three years, five years now? They didn't have any immediate adversity, but what they had was no plan about where they were going.
Event? No, they had issues. They dealt with them. They did it brilliantly, but they needed to make this pivot. Once those first three issues were kind of dealt with. To really begin a process of strategy is, is that eventually you're going to have to put that at the forefront. And the second part of it is, is to put all kinds of options that you may not think of.
I have another client I'm dealing with on a strategy strategic planning process, where we were talking about just the CEO and I about their board, and maybe not the strategy direction that everybody thinks they need to have. The board needs to have. And I throw out some suggestions. She says, oh my gosh. I mean, if we even brought that up in a meeting, they go crazy.
Like, why is it against your mission? Options are good. It doesn't mean they all need to be executed. But I do believe we have a responsibility when we are in these leadership positions to put as many options on the table that keep us moving in the direction of the mission. And even if it's not a popular option, that doesn't mean it's a bad option, means it's worthy of a conversation and it may be dismissed.
And that's also okay. But if you limit your options, you limit the foresight that a leadership group can have a board can have. And so facing strategy and doing so at some point and with lots of options is a positive when dealing with or coming out of adversity. So reality being honest separate effort. It's efforts different than effectiveness that we want to shorten the horizon for the time frame we have for the immediacy.
And the bigger the immediacy, the less time we have. And then number six, building back into strategy. Eventually we're going to invest in this recovery with people. We're not just performance, no guilt. We're going to bring in the right resources to be successful, and we're going to communicate more. We're going to be more open with donors, with the board, with staff, with anybody to listen to say, look, this is what we're doing and we're going to be okay, but we are going to look different.
Adversity and adjustments are important because that's what we're dealing with today. We're dealing with adversity and we're not dealing with enough adjustment. I want to steal to conclude kind of the tactical. And then we'll let you go for the day. I want to steal from my father, you know, still miss him terribly. And the only man I ever wanted to be.
And I learned more from him probably than any other person on earth. My father learned as a military hero and an officer, and in war in Vietnam and then teaching at West Point, that you always have a plan A, you have a plan B of a plan C, and you have a plan B. I'm 55 years old and most days I got a plan A, a plan B, a plan C, and plan B.
Now that may say a lot about me, but what it does is present me options. And when I face adversity, I'm always looking at how many different ways can I try to solve it. I take that mentality in today's podcast, but also into the work that I do as a leader. I help clients figure out how many options they have and maybe see options they don't necessarily see, even though they're more, you know, on the ground.
Sometimes it's can't see the force of the trees. The point is, and give credit to dad is, is that all of these moments, choosing to engage in them back to our Gaelic saying it's a choice. You have the choice as a leader to engage in adversity. You also have an equal choice in to watch it happen. Just sit back and wonder what's happening.
I found that in life, the greatest leaders have chosen to be people who do things, who are action oriented. They don't do it autocratic. They don't do it without forethought. They don't do it without trying to figure out how do I get the smartest people around me to help me figure out what I need to do? But they don't sit back.
And that's what our nonprofits are going to need as we kind of weather this interesting time. And hopefully today, this helps you kind of figure that out. And how to do that. Don't forget check out the blogs of how it plans to become two per week in RSS feed. Right to you. If you're interested, you reach out to me like Jordan did at podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com.
As mentioned all today. Today was all about different ways of looking at the challenges we're dealing with and there's enough of them. And what I'm hoping is, is that today in this podcast, in kind of my 20 minute or so classroom per week, or if you work with me, that I'm helping you deal with the adversity, figuring out how to make it better because our world needs nonprofit and philanthropy.
It's the whole between corporate which is interested only really in profit and government, which isn't all that efficient. There's this gap in the middle of nonprofit philanthropy. Work is right there. That's what we're trying to do to solve those problems. And internally, those are more societal or macro problems. The micro problems of our organizations need attention. And I'm hoping today you get a chance to kind of think about that and be someone, as I conclude, who's someone who makes things happen because the other to watching what happened and wondering what happened, don't get you to solutions like thank GM level 25 plus years ago when he said it and it stuck with me.
Now I use it all the time, but thank him for bringing it to me and maybe me sharing it with you. I look forward to seeing you the next time right back here on the next edition of Around With Randall. Don't forget. Make it a great day.