The Dr. Doug Edge: Real Talk with Real Leaders
Across law, business, and finance, Dr. Doug Hirschhorn — advisor to the elite — goes beyond the surface to decode the strategies behind success. No scripts. No fluff. Just what works.
The Dr. Doug Edge: Real Talk with Real Leaders
Leadership Beyond Profit: Ben Thomases, CEO of Queens Community House
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What makes a meaningful life? For Ben Thomases, CEO of Queens Community House, the answer came from an unlikely source: Charlotte's Web. "A spider's life is a messy thing. I thought I could lift up my life by helping you," became his guiding principle in choosing purpose over profit.
Queens Community House serves 28,000 residents annually in America's most diverse county, providing everything from early childhood programming to immigration legal services, LGBTQ support centers to meals for homebound seniors. But what truly sets the organization apart isn't just what they do—it's how they lead.
Faced with the perpetual challenge of limited resources, Thomases has developed a leadership approach that corporate America should take note of. "We will not succeed if I'm a leader and my executive team are leaders while everyone else follows. We succeed when everyone is a leader," he explains. This distributed leadership model transforms constraints into creativity, allowing a part-time staff member to recruit volunteer dance instructors or musicians who enhance programming without increasing costs.
The conversation dives deep into practical leadership strategies: developing managers internally rather than just promoting skilled practitioners, maintaining laser-focus on mission over money, building trust through authentic relationships, and embracing honest self-evaluation when goals aren't met. "We don't mess around. At the end of the year we look ourselves in the eye," Thomases shares, explaining how acknowledging failures drives improvement.
Perhaps most striking is the parallel between nonprofit and corporate leadership challenges. Whether leading a Fortune 500 company or community organization, principles of purpose-driven leadership, honest assessment, and empowering others remain universally powerful. As Thomases notes, many successful professionals eventually ask themselves, "What am I going to do to leave the world better than I found it?" This conversation offers compelling answers.
Ready to find meaning beyond the bottom line? Visit queenscommunityhouse.org to explore how your skills could create lasting community impact.
Introduction to Ben Thomases
Speaker 1Hey Ben, how are you? I'm great. Doug, how are you? Good, thanks for joining me today.
Speaker 1So just to give a little background, I've known you, for we met through my dear friend, kamal Barwani, yep, and I'd known Kamal for many, many years. But then I had an opportunity to be on the board at Queens Community House and see you firsthand with not just the work that Queens Community House does, but also you as a leader, and I was. I came home and told my wife I was like this dude's real, like he's legit. I remember the first time I met you I was like why are you here? Like I was like why are you like you guys? Like why are you here? Like I was like why are you like you should be in corporate America? And I wasn't. I wasn't trying to be a jerk or insulting, I was like you, just you got the stuff. So, to start off, I just want to give you an opportunity to talk about. I know you're the CEO of Queens Community House, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about Queens Community House and the work it does. So go ahead.
Speaker 2Great. Well, first of all, doug, thanks for having me and thanks so much for your kind words about my leadership. It's very flattering. So Queens Community House we've been around since 1975. It's our 50th anniversary year that we're celebrating right now.
Queens Community House Overview
Speaker 2Organizations that combine holistic human and social services with leadership development and community building and community organizing. So we provide services for people of all ages with an approach that really focuses on engaging people in improving their own lives and improving their own community, and the services include early childhood programming, afterschool programming for elementary and middle school students. We also have recreational services for teens and young adults that feed into college and career oriented programs for teens and young adults, including alternative high schools for young people who have struggled in conventional high schools, job training programs and college support and college access programming. We also we serve the most diverse county in the United States of America. Queens County is the most diverse county, perhaps the most diverse county in the world. We serve primarily immigrant populations. More than 50% of the people we serve each year are immigrants or children of immigrants.
Speaker 2Last year we served 28,000 Queens residents and so we have services for adults and families which are focused on, which are partially focused on, immigration specific services. So we have adult education, english for speakers of other languages, we have immigration legal services and then we also have generalized family support and family case management services where our family support coordinators just provide support, coordination really for families who are struggling with complex and overlapping challenges. And then we also have services for older adults. We have six non-residential senior centers where people come for breakfast and or lunch to play table tennis, to do Zumba, to paint, to do calligraphy, to be in a chorus and to volunteer and support each other. And then we have case management and home-delivered meal services for homebound seniors. So we deliver 700 meals a day to homebound older adults. Our services also include some LGBTQ specific services. So we have the first and only LGBTQ senior center in Queens and LGBTQ teen drop-in center in our young adult services portfolio.
Speaker 1Got it. I remember when I first met you, I just come from a Robin Hood event actually it was the Heroes Breakfast event, their annual event in the city and came to see you right after that. I know Robin Hood, I believe, is one of the organizations that supports Queens Community House, but I remember you walked me through the center. I'm not from Queens, I'm from Miami Florida. You walk me through the center and I'm not from Queens, I'm from Miami Florida. So you know my attachment to Queens is the New York Mets, more specifically the eighties, you know late eighties Mets more specifically Gary Carter.
Speaker 1I was just always a catcher. He was the first million dollar contract player and I was in ninth grade and I was a catcher. I was like I want to be like him and my uniform number was eight since that day and I was a huge Gary Carter fan, anyway. So I remember walking through the center and there was a class going on where they were teaching English and it really hit me. You know, as someone who you walk through life and you kind of have your own stuff that you deal with you and you, and you don't really think about as much if it's not in your face every day. You don't think about some of the struggles that people have, not just financially, but you think about even just being able to speak the language and what that must be like and and and.
Speaker 1What I really admired was the passion. I mean these people were like these were older adults and they were trying to learn a language so to to to make their lives and quality of life better. And you blew me away. I mean I, I, I spent my days thinking about people and dealing with leaders and CEOs mostly, well, exclusively corporate America, or hedge funds or private equity funds Now law firms as well, and I remember and I really wasn't saying it in an insulting way I looked at you and I was like I was like why are you here? And I thought to myself you were really special, you were unique, you had a skill set that was really designed to be a leader. And what I really want to ask you now is what put you on this path? What is it that put you to go down the path of a 501c3, the Queens Community House, the 501c3? What puts you down the path to want to be in this area, in this service?
Speaker 2I'll say that I had a few professors in college. I went to Swarthmore College. Particularly, one of my mentors was a philosophy professor, a guy from the Bronx back when the Bronx was a Jewish area, my grandparents were from the Bronx Philosophy professor named Rich Schuldenfrey, and he really challenged me to think about what makes a life a good life and what would make you feel satisfied every day and what would make you feel at the end of your life like life was, like your life had been meaningful. And that's a big part of what put me on this path and one way I think about it really hit me. Hit me. My kids are 12 and 14 now, uh, but probably seven or eight years ago when I uh was in my earlier.
Speaker 2I've been at queen's community house 10 years now, so I was in my first few years at queen's house. My kids were in that age where you're doing a lot of read, read out, read aloud to them at bedtime kind of thing. I read them both charlotte's web, uh, at least once, maybe one of them twice, and most people are familiar with the story of Charlotte's Web. There's a pig who's going to die at Christmas time and Charlotte the spider rescues him by writing flattering things about him in her web. And then there's a climactic scene at the end of the book where the pig Wilbur learns that Charlotte is going to die because the lifespan of a spider is only a year and he's overwhelmed with grief and he says why did you help me? You're dying.
What Makes a Life Meaningful
Speaker 2And she says, wilbur, a spider's life is a messy thing. We trap and eat flies and I thought I could lift up my life a little bit by helping you. And that's really. I was like, wow, that's deep, because it really spoke to me. It's really what, what this is about for me, it's, it's, it's. It makes me feel like, yeah, there's good reason to get up every morning and something to tell my kids about why, who I am as a person, and and something to talk to lots of other people about too.
Speaker 1Well, I I appreciate that story on many levels and I can tell you that they're lucky to have you. You know they and I'm not saying this because you're sitting in front of me and I'm being nice like they're lucky to have someone of your caliber of leadership, not just commitment, because I'd imagine there are a lot of people that do that it's not for the money, they do it because of the passion, the love, the interest, the wanting to give back, the, maybe the feelings that they get from, from helping. You know all those things bundled in. But to have someone with all those things and especially in New York, where money is such a focus and resources and you're surrounded by massive wealth, you know and to decide Look, I don't know how much you make, but I know it ain't five million bucks a year to decide it's OK. There are other ways to feel happiness in life and actually I'm going to change that word.
Speaker 1I heard a podcast received from Dan Kahneman when he was alive I think it might have been his last podcast or one of his last ones and his final era of research. Dan Kahneman is the father of behavioral finance. His final era of research was actually about happiness and satisfaction and you said the word satisfaction and you just said, at Swarthmore, that the professor and the satisfaction word and I thought to myself, that's, that's compelling, right? It wasn't. It was about feeling satisfied every day. And and this is this is where it landed. I think I really I think it's great, I'm so excited to be able to have you and talk, because it wasn't the intent of when I started this podcast. I didn't have you in mind. Again, I think you're great, but I wasn't like, oh, let me get Ben on this.
Speaker 1It hit me when I was on the panel recently, when you asked me to be on the panel recently, and I thought I would love to have you here and talk about it, because you are a CEO and leader of people, but from a different lens. The people I deal with are always they're driven by economics or they're driven by resources or by ego, and that's not what this is about. But I do want to ask you questions about leadership, sure. So what's really interesting to me is the concept of doing more with less. So you have people that are passionate about helping others, but you can't pay them a ton, so money is not the motivator, right? So, as a leader. How do you keep them engaged, focused? I imagine there are days there are a lot of really not great days and some great rewarding days also, but what are some things that you do as a leader that can keep them engaged and motivated?
Leading with Limited Resources
Speaker 2Yeah, you're a hundred percent right. I'll just give a little bit of context. Queens Community House is primarily government funded and we have contracts to provide all these services in the community and the contracts typically don't pay as much as we really need to provide these services. So the staff are underpaid and working with scarce resources and dealing and seeing a lot of people who are really struggling. So you might have staff in an after school program who see that you know an eight year old child is struggling because there's some challenge at home. Maybe the family's at risk of being evicted and we actually we have eviction prevention services at Queens Community House as part of our overall support for families, but it doesn't always work because the housing situation in Queens and New York City more broadly is so rough and so people are seeing other. They're trying to help people and they're seeing people struggling with other. They're trying to help people and they're seeing people struggling with challenges that we can't always help them with. So it is tough.
Speaker 2There are there are tough days, for sure, and at the same time, I think the the main thing we do to keep people motivated. There's a few one. One is just really the the focus laser-like on the mission and vision of queen's community house, right, so, um, because that's what brings people into this field. 100, it's because they care about the community. And um, and there are too many organizations that kind of drift off mission, non-profit organizations, mission-based organizations that drift off from the mission or that aren't talking to the staff enough and connecting their daily struggles with the mission, and so it's a lot of what we do in communicating with staff is to always have them feeling like that's they know that their challenges, their daily struggles, are related to pursuit of this mission.
Speaker 2And really beautiful vision. And I just want to take a minute to read the vision of Queens Community House because I think it is beautiful and it's what motivates people. Queens Community House envisions Queens as an empowered community that values diversity, respect and mutual responsibility. In this community, all people are actively engaged, feel supported, have a voice and experience equal access to opportunities. And it's that last piece experience equal access to opportunities that is maybe the most powerful and most astonishingly ambitious, because we're talking about people from all over the world, people of all income backgrounds, people whose some people's parents are professionals and some people's parents are migrant farm workers.
Speaker 1The, the, the workforce there, there, how many people do you have working for you Full-time?
Speaker 2staff Full-time staff 280, but we also have about 250 part-time staff because of all our afterschool programs. Okay, so we have a lot of people that work from three to six. So it's over 500.
Speaker 1Over 500 people, and I got to imagine it's always I mean, as with all charities and public service organizations they're always resource starved, right, there's never too much money they can have. Right, they've never said, oh, we've had enough money this year, we don't need a fundraise. You know, it's always's always. They always need more. They're always aside from the fact that I would think that that's probably got to be pretty grueling and tiring over time, but that's not really what I wanted to ask you. What I wanted to ask you was doing more for less.
Speaker 1Now, that's an interesting parallel in corporate America, right? So in growth times, resources are great. You know free lunch for everybody. You know coffee, whatever. You want donuts for breakfast in the break rooms In your world, right? You probably never really have that resource luxury opportunity. It's probably always some version of you know we need more resources than we need a lot more resources when you're dealing with the doing the same or more with less. That's what I want to ask you about, because I think that's something that you have continual experience with out of having to just survive as an organization and, believe it or not, that's one of the most challenging things as a performance coach the work that we do with Corporate America is helping executives and CEOs understand how to do more with less while keeping people engaged and retained and motivated. So I understand you're saying about the mission, but how do you think about doing more with less? Like, how do you think you deal with that every day? Like, how do you think about that? How do you communicate that to people?
Speaker 2Yeah, I'll just I'll answer your question. I just do want to offer one caveat. I think there are some people out there in the funding community who think it's great that nonprofits are scrappy and do more with less. And I just have to say, before I answer your question, it's not great. Government funders and philanthropic funders should take responsibility for funding us so that we have the resources to have some spare capacity to think and plan, to be entrepreneurial, so that we can invest in new ideas, new service development, the kind of chronic starving of the nonprofit sector. There's a lot of creativity. I'm happy to talk about it, but it's also very harmful to the sector and to our society more broadly, because it means we're under-investing in the kinds of people who Queens Community House serves young people and immigrants, who are the future of people who Queens Community House serves, people who young people and immigrants who are the future of this country.
Speaker 2So, having said that one thing, this ties back to the other part of my answer about leadership that I didn't get to. Part of our philosophy at Queens Community House, and I said this at the outset we're a leadership development organization. We will not succeed if I'm a leader and the eight or nine members of my executive team are leaders and everyone else is followers. We succeed when everyone is a leader. So a part-time group leader at our afterschool program who is six or seven or eight steps down the organization chart from me, we're looking at that person as a potential leader because that person might, when you're talking about doing more with less, that person might have a friend who is a professional dancer and that professional dancer might volunteer and lead a dance workshop at the afterschool program. And that's how we do more with less.
Everyone as a Leader Approach
Speaker 2When people feel like they are empowered to be leaders and to think creatively, then you get the full creativity of 500 plus people. And so you know we have our senior centers. Typically, we operate a senior center that serves lunch for a hundred people a day and provides all these different activities with a budget of about $700,000 a year. When I first arrived at Queens Queen House, we had one senior center didn't have money for lunch and its budget was $80,000 a year and we used that all to pay one staff person who was the director and all she did was recruit volunteers. Every activity at the senior center was led by volunteers. We had a writing workshop that was read by a retired writer and we had a chorus that was read, led by retired musicians, and dance classes that were led by people who love to dance. So people do incredible, creative things when you give them space to be creative and to be leaders and when you have this philosophy that we want everybody in the organization to be a leader.
Speaker 1So talking about the empowering people and giving everyone the opportunity to be a leader within the company, within the organization, within the nonprofit, so there's a collective ownership, which I understand and get. What about the filter process? So do you fundamentally believe that every human being inside of them has leadership potential, capability, skills, or do you actually have a screening process that you look for with people Say, oh, that person's going to be, you know, they got it in them, they're going to be a great leader. How do you think about that?
Speaker 2I do fundamentally believe that every human being has it in them to be a leader at a certain moment, and if they are taught and developed and supported and I also I don't think that everybody has it in them to be a CEO or to be, you know, a chief program officer or vice president for youth services or something like that, right.
Speaker 2So, because leadership means different things at different moments in time, and so we certainly are very, very rigorous about both how we recruit and screen staff and how we think about when people are ready to be promoted to the next level, we do a lot of leadership development in terms of internal promotions. It's very hard to hire people from the outside because our salary structure is not as high as we would like it to be, and so we have the clear sense of what are the qualifications to move someone up from being a direct service worker to being a manager, from being a manager of direct service workers to being manager of managers, and we actually have developed an in-house management training that is designed for different levels of management, designed for different levels of management.
Speaker 1And then the development is it internally created? Do you have external resources that volunteer themselves to help out with the development? How does that work?
Nonprofit vs Corporate Leadership
Speaker 2Yeah, both. So, as I mentioned, we developed this in-house management training because there's a lot of external resources. There's great programs at Columbia Business School and nonprofit management that we're offered access to through some of our philanthropic funders who also support those training programs, but those are accessible to a handful of staff a year and we realized that we wanted to have a baseline that every manager at Queens Community House would go through a management training, because it's so common in our field certainly for people to be really good at what they do and then they're promoted to manage the people who do what they did. So if you're a really good group leader in an afterschool program, then you get promoted to assistant director and now you're supervising a bunch of group leaders. Right, You're in college, you're working part-time for three years as a group leader directly serving middle schoolers, and then you get your degree.
Speaker 2You're looking for a full-time job and we say we offer you a job as an assistant director, but you've never managed anyone before. And being really good with kids and teaching other people how to be good with kids in the way you are are very different skill sets. In fact, people are often terrible at teaching the things that they're good at doing instinctively, because they just do it instinctively. So how do you teach somebody how to do something that you never really learned? You just did it. You just did it naturally.
Speaker 1Yeah, that resonates on a lot of levels. Really learned, you just did it. You just did, naturally, yeah, that that resonates on a lot of levels. I'll start with the sports psychology level, where where, uh, there have been interviews where tiger woods was asked questions about how to break down his swing and, um, you know, at the end of the day, instinctually what he's doing when he tries to describe it. It's actually not what he's what he was doing with his swing.
Speaker 1Um, ted williams used to claim he could see the laces hit the baseball and the bat, and then, when technology got to the point where they realized that with, with, slow, with, uh, with, with, uh, cameras and the technology got to the point where they could slow down that actual experience, your eyes don't actually see the ball hit the bat, your eyes are over here. Still, the ball is back here, you know, um, and Ted Williams says well, it felt that way, right, so it felt like I could. You know, um. So there are plenty examples in sports psychology that that I, uh was enamored by for many years in the corporate world, and here's an interesting parallel. This is why I love having you here to talk about this, uh, cause it just opens up this whole. This opens up this whole world of similarities.
Speaker 1Promotion happens all the time in the corporate world, where people are successful in their job and then they get moved to the management level, but they have no management skills. Now my company exists by definition leadership development. That's what we do. We look for those inflection points. A lot of our work now is with law firms, and so you have a very talented, successful lawyer at a big law firm and then they get promoted to partner and they're 32 years old. They've never managed. Now they're doing business development. Now they're doing management. Now they're doing things that weren't part of they didn't go to law school to learn how to do business development right, no different than you know, doctors don't go to med school to learn bedside manner. But bedside manner is a differentiator of you know on which pediatrician you take your kids to or which dentist. It's not the one that is, you know, the most trained, skilled one, it's the one that actually makes them feel the happiest and most comfortable and will answer the questions.
Speaker 1And so that's a space that, when you talk about it in the not-for-profit world and the training, that's one of the things that I thought made you different. I saw that you were looking at it like a business and a corporation. And then I heard that Robinhood that you were on their list. It made sense to me because that's all they do is invest in companies and not-for-profits, but they treat it like a business. It's not just we have a great idea, a great concept serving for a great purpose. It has to be run right by a business and like a business and there's accountability.
Speaker 1And then when I had the opportunity to be on your board for a brief period of time, I felt like I was sitting through a corporate board meeting like a regular normal, like this was like real, real grownups for lack of a better term you know, dealing with real issues. And it was like oh, this is like a, this is like a company that, basically, you know, has to, has budget cuts and is looking at you know, has budget cuts and is looking at you know how to make, do more with less, and they're always resource starved. It happens to be in the not-for-profit sector, but the problems were the same. And then I'm looking at you. I'm like and here's a leader who's actually like, instead of being like, where's my exit, where's my parachute, you're like nope, double down. It's like I've been around not-for-profits. The people were smart, engaging, passionate.
Speaker 1I used to work at the JCCA years and years and years ago in Flossmoor, illinois, and so that was my first real experience of not-for-profit. There were plenty of people that were there because nice people but not really qualified to do much, and then there were a couple of people that you know were really talented people, that this is just their passion, and what I saw was a lot more of those people in your universe. Uh, people that it wasn't board members, it was like the P, the workers, the people that were actually there doing those things. Um, do you, do you have? What's your turnover? Do you have high turnover with them? Are they? Are they staying around because of you?
Speaker 2I think people are staying around because we have low turnover, especially as people move up the ranks. Of course, we recruit a lot of young people straight out of college and there's substantial turnover in those positions. People are still figuring out what they want to be when they go to grad school. Also, we have a lot of turnover because there's a housing crisis in New York City and young people are moving out of the city because it's just too hard in New York City. And young people are moving out of the city because it's just too hard.
Speaker 2But as people move up the ranks, people stay because Queens Peony House has a great culture. It had the culture before I came here, so I inherited an executive team. I had five people reporting to me when I started 10 years ago and every one of them had been here more than 20 years, right and so, and most of those people have turned over. One of the started 10 years ago and every one of them had been here more than 20 years, right, um and so, and and most of those people have turned over. Why one one of the uh, initial folks left who's now been been here 30 years? Um, but you know. But I have new stairs on my executive team, one person has served 10 years with me. Uh, you know, other folks have stayed five, seven years.
Speaker 2Because I, because when people are motivated by the mission and they and they feel like the organization is really oriented toward the mission and they feel like they have space to use their talents and to really be leaders, that's, that's what motivates them to stay. That's a big, a big part of my leadership style is just to make this not about me. It's not about me, it's not about it's not about my ego. It's it's about the mission and vision of Queens community house. And if you're, if you're doing something that's advancing that mission and vision, my job is to support you and people feel that. When people feel that and makes them, it makes them want to get up and come back to work.
Speaker 1Uh, pivoting a little bit to your peer group, the um, what, what, what advice or words of wisdom would you share with other executive directors, slash, or or CEOs of not-for-profits that are that are your size or not your size yet but want to get to the next, Like? What are some nuggets of?
Speaker 2Yes, certainly that piece that I just shared. It can't be about you, right. It's got to be keep your mission and vision focused at all times. It also can't be about the money, right? I think a lot of nonprofit leaders actually get sidetracked because they think about success in terms of growing the organization's revenue and Quince Criaz's revenue has grown every year that I've been here as the leader. But we've also passed up on a lot of revenue growth opportunities because they were not aligned with our mission and vision, and that's really important.
Speaker 2So another piece is just so much of this work is about building trust. It's a small. The world of New York City is a huge city, but the world of government-funded nonprofits is a small world and the interplay of people in between city-state government and the nonprofit sector. I worked in city government earlier in my career. That's where I met your friend, kamal, and we became friends and just being a good and trustworthy person in that world is so key to your success because the relationships matter over and over, and over and over again and being self-conscious about always building those relationships, always putting yourself forward, going out of your way to help someone out when you can, even if it's not directly connected to your success right now. It all comes back in the end.
Speaker 1And any big. I'm going to pivot a little bit and get a little bit more pointed. You know we've all made mistakes in our careers. Is there any like oh, that was not great. Any big ones that kind of resonate with you that you learned from and grew out of?
Building Trust and Strategic Growth
Speaker 2I think I have. Sometimes early in my career, when I first came on as the leader of Queens Community House, I tended to bargain too hard with some of the outside vendors that we provided and then it just made those relationships less successful. Honestly, if you're dealing with a consulting firm whether it's a fiscal consulting firm or an attorney you just got to pay them what they're worth and what they need to be successful. At a certain point you think you're being efficient by bargaining super hard, but in the end you kind of force them to make trade-offs and you don't get as good service and at the same time also you got to spend money. To make money, I mean in the long run, I've invested in prospect research on the fundraising side and in better IT. Just think about very strategically how to spend money to build your organization's base of funding. So I think both of those I think the tendency to have that scarcity mindset really can inhibit growth.
Speaker 1Those are really again. It's like thinking about the private equity world. You know, as a vendor to private equity companies, you know these are professional negotiators to the point where it's like almost a sport or a game for them. Yeah, but what I always say I was like you realize you'll get more out of like the vendor if you pay them what they think they're like. No one's trying to rip anybody off here. It's like you might have won the battle but you lose the war. It's like.
Speaker 2So when you talk about the point you make about it being a sport or a game. So we haven't talked about this. But I have a master's in business administration and I love I remember taking my. I took a negotiations class in business school and I loved that negotiations class and I knew I was going to go into the non-profit sector and we had some negotiations tournament and I won it and I was like so proud of myself, like I'm all these people are going to go corporate and I like I just waxed the floor with them in the negotiation tournament. You know like. But then you get on to life, you're like this is not a negotiations tournament and winning the negotiations tournament among your partners doesn't actually position you to succeed as an organization it doesn't.
Speaker 1I've had plenty of clients or people that I not people, but like companies that I've done work with and it got to the point where it's like you know, you give everyone the benefit of doubt and then they end up not being great partners and the money might be better but the brain damage wasn't worth it and uh and I'll, I'll be like no thanks. Like I'm, I'm good, like you know, feel free to use someone else. It's like cause cause. Now it's become. Now it's no longer fun. Right now it's no longer. You know, I'm not enjoying. I'll still do the work, but I'm not enjoying. I'd rather do work with someone that I'm enjoying doing the work with. And that, to me, has been one of the keys of satisfaction in life is being able to get to a point where you're able to see the difference between who's a good partner and not a good partner and knowing what is a good partner for you is a good partner, not a good partner, and knowing what is a good partner for you. Now the negotiations piece. I'm glad, I'm really happy, that you brought that up as a you recognize very early in your career that you're going to get more out of people by paying them what they're worth, what they think they're worth. And, by the way, here's the benefit also, they're servicing a nonprofit. There's not a human being on earth that's trying to rip off a nonprofit. Like people, just don't do that, like that's evil, right? So, yeah, someone do is like, of course they're going to give you the nonprofit price. They're not going to give you the corporate America, you know 5X they're going to give you. The bare bones is what it costs to do, or they'll do a pro bono, right? Either one and you know I've told you this in the past and I'm telling you it again there are very few human beings that I actually genuinely, really like. Probably not a great thing for me to say, but it's the reality. Anybody that knows me, they know I'm a people person to a certain extent, I like studying people, but I have a very small group of friends. But occasionally I will meet people in business, and Kamal is one of them, by the way, I met him through business. He was a board member at a portfolio company that I was brought in to do some work with. And you know, ben, I'll tell you anytime, anywhere, like you know, if I can, if I can ever help or support. I do plenty of things for free for people that I don't particularly like. I'm more than happy to give back in my own way and I told you this before.
Speaker 1But the reason why I had stepped off the board was because I felt like I wasn't adding value. I just didn't have and'm I feel like I'm taking a seat from someone who might have more to offer with what you all were doing and needing. And, and, quite frankly, the one thing that I uh, you had a woman facilitate an offsite and she was phenomenal, phenomenal and I'm like that, like that's, you know, that's what I would be able to offer and you've got someone and that's great. Like I wasn't like, oh, I can't believe that, but that was very refreshing to see that you had. It wasn't like, oh, here's so-and-so from one department trying to lead a group. It's like this woman actually was a facilitator and she facilitated the offsite which I got an opportunity to sit in and was taking notes and learning and growing, and it was wonderful.
Speaker 1But I wanted to stay in touch with you. Regardless, kamal, I'll always be in touch with you, um, regardless, um, kamal, I'll always be in touch with and, by extension, you. But you know, uh, look, I met you at first through kamal, but I'll stay in touch with you regardless, uh, independent of kamal at the end of the day, um my last, my last, great to have you speak at our career panel for our summer youth employment program.
Speaker 2I could, I could see where the work was like a coaching session for 500 young people at the same time and it was, it was like they were. They were eating it up.
Speaker 1It was fun. The best question that they asked I told my son, my son's 20 years old and I have three kids, but my middle one's he's 20. And he said did they ask any good questions? And yeah, the best question that I got asked was what would I be doing if I wasn't doing my occupation? And, and the god's honest truth was, I'd be a gamer.
Speaker 1And I, and and you saw the crowd react those kids were like all into it, ben, I. I mean, it's like I, for me, it's like it's, it's you know, everything from learning and challenging myself educationally. But it's also made me very relatable now, at 53 years old, to a whole generation. You know down where I understand their world and how they think and what they see. I used to game with my son when he was 13, with his friends. Like it was like a way for me to be able to have a dialogue with them instead of just throwing a baseball in the backyard. It's like we were able to, you know, be in their Fortnite world until they got much better than me and they started like handing me things that would blow me up and then I was like that's not fun anymore for me, you know, but to this day like they're 20 years old now, but it always a connectivity that I, that I really loved. I was the one cool dad that was the gamer, like I could always do that.
Speaker 1Last question for you, and thank you again for, for, for, for doing this and for your transparency and candidness. I like to like to end each each of my uh discussions and conversations with people about edge competitive advantage um, to me, that's it's. It's just. It's just this concept of like. If you don't have one, then you shouldn't be competing Like. Everyone has or should have some advantage or competitive advantage in an industry or a space or whatever it is that differentiates them. So what do you view yours as Like? What is your competitive advantage over other talented peers in the space? What differentiates you peers in the space? What?
Competitive Edge in Nonprofit Leadership
Speaker 2differentiates you, I think I think there's a couple of things. One is I just love doing a lot of different things. So I love being. I love being out here, you know, interviewing you on this podcast or public speaking. I love getting involved in really wonky conversations about program design. I love taking a wealthy donor out to lunch and just getting to know that person and hear what kind of meaning they're looking for from a connection to Queen's Twinney House. I love all those different things. There's a lot of people who like one or the other or one or two of them.
Speaker 2Another thing is not afraid of of hard truths, not afraid to admit when we failed. So you know, a big example about this that I wanted to share with your listeners a little bit is our, the way we use our strategic plan and I think the offsite that you referenced we were talking about our strategic plan. Um, so we, you know we have a strategic plan. We really use it very actively. We have five priority areas, we have key goals under those priority areas and we have annual objectives and we have set up those annual objectives so that they're measurable. We know at the beginning of our year we're going to achieve some of these objectives and we're not going to achieve some of these objectives and we don't mess around. At the end of the year we look ourselves in the eye and we say, oh man, under our advancing fiscal health strategic plan priority area, we set 10 objectives and we only hit six of them or we only hit four of them.
Speaker 2It doesn't matter how hard. The truth is. The truth is the truth and I think that it's an incredibly powerful tool there's. There's too many times that people, especially in this field, they want to feel good and they kind of massage, they kind of spin things to make a year or a quarter that wasn't so great, whether it's in a specific program or organization-wide or with respect to a specific goal. They kind of massage it to make it look better. So everybody can feel better and I think just being honest with ourselves and each other internally and with key stakeholders about where we really succeeding and where we're struggling gives us the push to really succeed.
Speaker 1And then are you willing to have that hard conversation with people? Yeah, that's great, that's great. Thank you, really. Thank you very much. This has been a highlight for me. It really has been enjoyable and again I'll say it like I did at the beginning, where I didn't go on this path of having a discussion-based podcast with you in mind path of having a discussion-based podcast with you in mind, but I thought to myself this is just a unique opportunity where I happen to know you and you're right, in line with the people that I want to be able to have discussions with and talk to about how they think, about leadership and the greatness that they've achieved. So, thank you very much for your time and I look forward to doing more stuff with you in the future. Penn.
Final Thoughts and Call to Action
Speaker 2Well, thank you very much, Doug. It's interesting. The one thing I'd love to close with is I mentioned that I like going out to lunch with potential donors and hearing their stories, and one of the reasons I love it is because I find that the story I told at the beginning about wanting to find some meaning in my life by helping other people so many people have that urge and there's so many people in corporate America who get a few decades into their career and say to themselves but what am I going to do to leave the world a little bit better than I found it? So I'll just say to your listeners, doug, if you're one of those people who's been a successful person a couple of decades in and you're listening to Doug's podcast, you're like what am I going to do? How can I look me up? Look up queerscommunityhouseorg, send me an email, say you heard Doug's podcast, you want to get involved? I'd love to figure out how to get you involved.
Speaker 1I think it's fantastic. Thank you, Ben.