006 Pivoting Away from Your Original Vision | Good Faith Founding Executive Director Curtis Chang

Curtis Chang set out to build a nonprofit nobody would ever know by name. He wanted Good Faith to be like Target: the store as the brand, not the founder. 

Four years later, Curtis, David French, and Russell Moore were at the center of the most prominent faith-and-politics curriculum in the country. A quarter million people had used it. This conversation is about how a founder navigates a pivot, and why market need and relationships sometimes rewrite the plan.

He also talks about the two ways nonprofit CEOs drift into bad decisions: chasing off-mission funding and staying stuck in a rut. And he offers a reframe on anxiety that has real implications for how CEOs lead through loss. Curtis calls it "holding," and he thinks the CEO's job in seasons of organizational pain is something closer to Chief Grieving Officer.

Curtis Chang is Founder and Executive Director of Good Faith, an organization at the intersection of Christian faith and public life. The After Party, its flagship curriculum on faith and politics, has reached over 250,000 users. The Good Faith Podcast ranks in the top 0.5% of all podcasts globally.

Transcript

Navigating Consequential Decisions in Nonprofits

Adam Jeske 0:04

Nonprofit CEOs are constantly making consequential decisions, often under pressure or in isolation. I'm Adam Jesky, the Nonprofit CEO Advisor, and this is the Nonprofit CEO podcast where CEOs talk about the decisions they carry. Today our guest is Curtis Chang, founding executive director of Good Faith. Curtis, welcome to the show. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. So for those who are not familiar, can you share a little bit about Good Faith?

Curtis Chang 0:33

Good Faith is a nonprofit. We're a 501c3 founded about six years ago. And it is a nonprofit that is produces content. So we're a content producer that seeks to equip Christians to engage with the wider world in ways that are faithful and healthy and good for both them and the world.

Adam Jeske 0:55

And you're the founding director, so you've been there through these years. I imagine that you have needed to make a number of consequential decisions during that time. Is there one that comes to mind that might be illustrative of how you make decisions or was a particularly thorny decision to navigate?

Curtis Chang 1:14

I think this gets to the question of the type of content since we are a content producer. Probably the most consequential material that we have produced is a project called The After Party. And that was a project done with New York Times columnist David French, uh, Christianity Today's editor-in-chief, Russell Moore. That came out in 2024 amidst a very contentious political season. Obviously, we had a presidential election and one in which uh Christians played a really decisive role, especially evangelical Christians. Um, and so our project was trying to help those Christians who were engaged in politics to do so in a way that was healthy, biblically grounded, and not feeding into the political polarization that so dominated our era. So that was what we're probably most known for. And what I've been known for, I also came out with a book called The After Party. That was a companion volume. In some ways, that was the uh height of our, and uh hopefully we'll reach new heights, but up until now, um probably parallel with that would be in addition to the podcast that I do called the Good Faith Podcast. Both of those really uh involved me putting myself out there. So I led the project, I wrote the book, I recruited David and Russell into it and really shaped the vision of it and as well as it was my team that executed. So I say that as a long uh introduction to what I think is a consequential decision that led up to that uh key strategic move we did to produce this content, which was when I started Good Faith, I never wanted to be well known for anything, really. I wanted to produce content that would equip the church and the content would stand on its own. Uh it would be the analogy I use is I wanted to be Target, like the store target, and produce a variety of content that churches, Christian leaders, ministries could essentially shop at and get their market needs met, especially in the key market of small group curriculum. So, you know, churches and Christian ministries often are organized by sub-small groups, and I wanted to resource them. Uh so really a consequential decision that has been uh infused to the arc of our story is how did we get from this vision of us being the target? And and the reason why I choose Target is because nobody knows the founder of Target. The founder of Target is not a brand name. The store is a brand name, and that's what I envisioned for good faith. And then, you know, how did I end up five, six years later where I'm putting myself much more forward? And it's these names, me, David, and Russell. David and Russell are much more famous than I am. But it's it's it's sort of driven by uh some kind of recognition within our world. So that's a big decision. We can talk more about how I got there, but um, that's been the arc, one of the key arcs of my leadership decision making is how do I get there?

Adam Jeske 4:29

As you considered um whether or not to go in the direction of the after party um efforts, kind of multifaceted campaign or um, you know, content in that direction, did you have alternative ideas or different pathways of how the organization could look and what kind of content you could do that you were deciding amongst a limited set of approaches toward? And after party was sort of the winner, so to speak?

Curtis Chang 4:58

Well, we did produce content in the trajectory there. The first content we produced was actually uh a small group curriculum that was revolving around my favorite idea that I've been trying to promote to Christians, which was you might call it the theology of institutions. So the idea that institutions matter, they matter to God, therefore they should matter to Christians and Christian leaders. It was giving especially a framework, I think, for some folks in your audience who may identify with faith, who haven't really connected deeply with their leadership of an organization and their faith life. Like how do the two meet? I mean, I'm talking about especially people of faith who are leading organizations that are secular in nature, right? So how do you ascribe faith values to an institution, especially say a secular institution that you're leading? So I came out with that in March 2020, was when we were finished and ready to produce it. So, as you may uh listeners may recognize, March 2020 was a very consequential date. That's when the pandemic erupted. And we realized there's probably not a lot of people who are that interested in that question right now. There's a lot of anxiety in the air. So we pivoted to produce a second content, which is um the anxiety opportunity, which was trying to help, again, our target audience are Christians, trying to help them connect their faith to a different approach to anxiety that really reflected the idea that anxiety is not just a problem to make go away, but is an opportunity for growth, personal growth, especially spiritual growth. So we pivoted, um, but we were still, and then I wrote a book called The Anxiety Opportunity. So we pivoted to that topic. And it was really the the after party was our third topic and not our first or our second. And so um, you know, we could have we could have gone different paths. We could have gone way further down this, you know, theology of institutions path, we could have gone further down this anxiety path. Uh, but you know, as part of our decision making, we landed on the after party. And again, I'm happy to talk more about that uh as you're interested.

Adam Jeske 7:16

How long were you in s a discernment process, a decision process related to go-no-go around stepping toward the after-party themes and the contentious conversation theme?

The After Party: Addressing Political Polarization

Curtis Chang 7:33

Aaron Powell You know, it's really hard for me to reconstruct a very linear decision-making path. And that I think is probably true in a lot of cases where that your nonprofit is a startup, because in that case, a lot of this is in the minds of the founder. And there's not a paper trail of strategy group meetings, consulting work, um, committees, and so forth. It's it really resides in the mind of the founder. So it's hard to reconstruct very linearly that path. But I would say some of the key factors were just, again, assessing the need out there. Just like we pivoted from theology of institutions to anxiety because of a clear pressing need. It was apparent that there was a pressing need to deal with political polarization among the church. And that market need was really a gaping hole. Starting from 2016, our national elections have been beset with very toxic polarization. I mean, you could say before 2016, but that's really when it was like a watershed. And the church was not equipped to deal with that. Uh, most pastors, leaders of churches, they don't have a degree in political science. That's not why they got into leading the type of organization they lead, you know, called the church. And so they were very uh unequipped, and most of them, you know, dealt with it by just ignoring the topic. And by ignoring the topic, the problem, of course, just metastasized such that in 2020, we had an even more intense polarization among Christians and still no real content out there to help pastors, church leaders deal with this. Now, you know, in 2016, you could be forgiven as a church leader or a content producer to have not sort of produced something to meet that particular topic. A lot of people didn't see it coming in 2016. But 2020, there's no excuse. We knew it was coming, and still there was no really nationally recognized, trusted content for churches to adopt in a in a broad and serious way. So as we entered 2024, and again, we we started in 2020, so we had four years to just kind of evolve and find our way to this. But as 2024 loomed, probably starting in 2023, beginning 2023, or the end of 2022, it just became apparent this was a gaping hole. It wasn't one we intended to meet in uh starting out, but we really needed to pivot in that direction because there just wasn't, there hadn't been any effort like this in the previous two uh political seasons around elections, and there wasn't anything that we could see coming over the horizon. So it was a matter of of need. And it was still what we did, you know, it was it was very clear to us it was still very much aligned with our mission. And that, of course, is a key um sort of framework you have to adopt when you're evolving and pivoting is how do you make these pivots still true to your mission? Um but you know, given our mission is really at the intersection of faith in the public life, it was clear, well, this is dead on in our mission. And so uh we needed to pivot in that direction.

Adam Jeske 10:50

And as you look back at the decision-making process specifically about what whether to step into this multifaceted after-party effort, kind of making that central to uh the work of good faith uh at that time. As you think about that decision-making process, are you happy with how you made that decision? Are there things that you would have changed about that decision?

Curtis Chang 11:15

I don't think so. Um I I it was the right decision at the time. It's the right decision looking back. Um and I know one of the topics you or a topic that perhaps you especially want to explore is this idea of nonprofit leaders that are structurally isolated. And I think especially as a founder, you have to really wrestle with that because again, where the organization goes really is a lot, you know, what you decide, what's happening in your head. And even the small team I had were clearly, you know, it w we talked, we, you know, especially the the guy named Chris Carter who helped me found it. We were in pretty regular conversation, and he was an important sounding board. But the reality is the decision was was mine to make. And, you know, one way I arrived at um, or another way I arrived at this pivot in addition to the market need was just assessing what were our um relationships, who who did we have key relationships with? And because I have been, you know, 30-year friends with David French, and you know, we're we were just part of the same fantasy baseball league for 25 years. We've just been good friends, you know, it was clear like he's neck deep, of course, in the world of politics as uh, you know, key, I would say one of the most important columnists uh writing today, uh, and certainly for the New York Times. You know, you're you're when you're deciding where to pivot to, you're also assessing who are my relationships that I can call on in making this pivot. And David was a key one. And and with David opened up with Russell Moore and more and more. So, you know, that was a probably another key factor in in in the algorithm, so to speak.

Adam Jeske 13:04

Yeah. And then going to impact uh rather than decision process, how do you evaluate how the process went, how the how this effort, this initiative went, uh, speaking of the after party?

Curtis Chang 13:19

Aaron Powell Well, I guess yeah, I sense two questions in what you're saying. There's evaluation of the decision-making process and evaluation of the impact, I think is what you're getting at for both. On the impact evaluation, it's simple. We we hired an impact measurement sort of outfit uh with a key researcher, uh, two key researchers, uh Hari Han, who is probably one of the most, you know, nation's most leading experts on political polarization and faith. I just happened to get, you know, this is again the um important of relationships. I just happened to meet her at a conference and she sat down next to me. I I think she wanted to meet me because she had heard about this project and it was right up a research alley. And as I cultivated that relationship, it became apparent to me, wow, you could really help me in this impact measurement because that's her field. And so we ended up working with Johns Hopkins, her um sort of institute, an institute of hers there and a key researcher that was under her to measure impact. And that, you know, that was it was a rigorous impact measurement, and it showed we really moved the meter in terms of changing people's beliefs, attitudes, uh capacities. And so that that was clear. And and uh I think there's a evident strategy for it. In terms of evaluating the decision-making process, I don't think I really did. I mean, when you're a startup, you're just moving so fast, and we're still moving fast, even after that period, that there's just not a lot of time to stop and say, oh, well, you know, let me do a forensic analysis of that decision-making process. You know, and the reality is that would just mean me going in my head and trying to retrace how I got there. Because again, in a founder-led nonprofit, that's the decision-making process that resides there.

Adam Jeske 15:05

And if I'm tracking rightly, there was this season focused on uh, I think you said organizational theology. Uh and then there was a season where with the anxiety opportunity and that book, that project, that course, and then the after-party focus. Uh, where is good faith sitting right now? What is the focus now, or what's on the horizon?

Curtis Chang 15:28

Where we're sitting right now is we're still promoting the after-party curriculum. It's not something that is just for a presidential election year. In fact, we think it's actually better for people to work with this curriculum. Uh, and it's a multifaceted curriculum. It's uh uh it centers around a video course for church small groups, but we've got the book, we've got even a worship album that helps Christians integrate some of these I key ideas in song, also. So it's a multi-facet, and it's so it has a lot of legs, and we feel like uh in some ways it's best to actually wrestle with these issues of politics and faith outside the very intense pressure and pressure cooker of a you know election season. So we're still promoting and it's still growing in adoption. At this point, uh, we estimate something like, you know, well over a quarter million uh users have used some aspect of this curriculum. And it's still going. So we're still pushing that out. But we're starting to call that uh tap the after party, we call it tap uh for short. So the after party 101. And we've just received some significant funding to tap 200, if you will. That's gonna be a major effort, just like it took years, at least a couple years to produce the after party 101. It's especially going to take more time uh because we've got sort of the bar has just been raised. And though then the our vision for the after-party uh 200 uh is even more expansive. So continue to push out the after-party 101, starting to develop the after-party uh 200. And then we want to keep the conversation going because the the course is a fixed content, right? Once you produce the course, that's the course. It's not designed to be highly responsive to current events, like what's happening in foreign affairs and a war that's breaking out with Iran and uh in oil and oil shortages, or domestically in uh ice raids, or, you know, something like that. That's not what it's designed to. It's designed to, you know, uh give more the underpinnings, the conceptual underpinnings. So we we know that there is a need, though, to help our audience and our users still make sense of what's happening in the world right now. And that's where our podcast comes in. It's called the Good Faith Podcast. It's uh, you know, if I may just plug it for a moment. Yeah. Uh if you are interested in the intersection of faith and public life, I think we're we really uh nail that well. And you know, we have guests like David Brooks, David French, Beth Moore. I mean, these are names that people of sort of certain Christian communities would recognize, as well as obviously secular audiences like who recognize David French and Russell Moore, uh theologian, like world-leading theologians like N.T. Wright, and so forth. We've been very successful. We're in the top 0.5%, not five top five percent, we're in the top 0.5% of global podcasts.

Decision-Making Challenges for Nonprofit CEOs

Adam Jeske 18:40

Fantastic. From that experience of building the podcast, let's widen out to also include you've done consulting, you've had academic appointments. And from that wider viewpoint, that vantage point that you have developed throughout your career, talk to me about what you see around decision-making processes going awry, and maybe that you have heuristics about decision-making that uh would be of interest to the nonprofit CEOs listening.

Curtis Chang 19:13

Well, one key decision-making that can go awry is when you go off mission. You know, that's probably a core one. Uh, when you chase some opportunity, like especially a funding opportunity that you uh you know, feel like you need the money, but the the actual work involved that that funding opportunity is gonna direct you, is gonna lead you, is gonna be off mission. You know, it's the classic tail-wagging dog phenomenon. Um, I don't feel like we succumb to that uh in good faith. I have seen that in my work as a consultant. So just for listeners, I before this work with good faith, I founded and led a consulting firm that serves nonprofit organizations, and that's been in existence for uh 15 years now. And I've served hundreds and hundreds of nonprofits. And that is one that you often see when you're doing, say, a strategic planning project, you often see, wow, we're we're drifting here, or people don't can't actually even articulate what the mission is. And that that I would say is especially vulnerable flaw, probably for large organizations uh and longer, more institutionalized foundations. I think founder-led more startup organizations, or just organizations that still have the founder there, they can still do that. They can still fall prey to that, but they're less liable to do that because you've got the founder with that founder DNA that kind of acts as a check on drift. But it can still happen. And so I would say that is one real flaw in decision making that can happen. I think another one would probably be something like you have lost efficacy because you haven't pivoted enough. Right. So the first flaw is you're pivoting too much and in a in a off-mission way. And then the other would be again, this is especially a danger of more institutionalized foundations, where you just get in a rut and you're just like doing what you've always been doing because you've got funding. Again, funding is a key driver here in terms of nonprofit CEOs, because they're constantly having to seek funding. And so where you've got funding patterns that keep you in a rut of, say, we just keep turning it out because that's what our contract for our government contracts uh has us doing. And so you're not pivoting enough. You're and you're just too stuck and not responding to changing, you know, again, what quote unquote market you know, realities for a nonprofit.

Adam Jeske 21:49

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah. What parts of leading a nonprofit in your personal experience as well as seeing inside other organizations, what parts of the nonprofit? Nonprofit CEO role tend to be magnets for difficult decisions.

Curtis Chang 22:08

Well, all of them. I mean, you're you're the you're the CEO, you're the top, you know, final decision maker, or you should be. President Obama once had this quote that said, I don't ever have any easy decisions. Because if it was an easy decision, it would have been made already by people sort of underneath me. I only get the tough decisions. Now, obviously, you know, no CEO has to make the kind of tough decisions that you know a president does. But you have your uh, you know, your version of that, your analogy to that, where what filters up in terms of you know specific decision making are the tough ones, are the hard ones that are the ones that you know always involve some cost and um and some painful trade-offs. I would say that is something another just reality of the of uh any CEO role, nonprofit or for-profit, is you have to, first of all, not be a uh a people pleaser, because again, because it's the tough decisions that arise for you, they're invariably gonna be decisions that incur costs, incur some pain uh for the organization, which means specific people are gonna be put in sort of some pain because their programs are gonna get cut, they're gonna get cut, uh you know, emphasis are gonna be in a different area. You can't be a people pleaser because you're gonna be inflicting pain somewhere, and you can't be pain-avoidant yourself because it's gonna be painful for you as the leader of the organization to make these kinds of hard calls. You know, when I consult with organizations when I'm in that uh distilled stage of whether to discuss whether to discern whether I should take this project or not, that's a key question I ask of the nonprofit CEO is what is your pain tolerance? Because uh you have to have some meaningful degree of that if a strategic planning project is going to work. And that's often what I'm brought in to do is strategic planning work because a good strategic plan has to inflict pain, because it means, you know, because a good strategy says you're gonna do this, but not that. You're gonna stop doing that, or you're not gonna go down that road because that you can't if you're gonna go down this road. And those are painful decisions.

Adam Jeske 24:29

Yeah, people hate prioritization. People hate deciding what they will not do. It is loss aversion, like writ large. Step back to the your book and thinking around the anxiety opportunity and how mental health works itself out or manifests itself in the life of leaders in the nonprofit sector. Um, talk to me about that. That's an interesting crossover that I've not had anyone raise on the podcast thus far.

Navigating Leadership Anxiety

Curtis Chang 25:02

I also, in my, again, my other hat, leading the consulting firm, lead a year-long training program for emerging leaders, for leaders who are poised to make the leap to be a CEO, but aren't there yet. One of our key themes is what is a great manager? Like, what is your vision of a great manager? And one of our um sessions that we do in this uh year-long cohort is one that I haven't seen done in any management training program that I've seen. It may exist, I just haven't come across it. And almost every leader who goes to our program hasn't ever encountered it. And that's called a great manager manages anxiety. And so why do we do that? Well, it's because anxiety is about loss. You just said that loss aversion, right, um, is what leads us to anxiety because we get anxious when there is some impending loss that happens. So for a CEO, it's like, okay, if I go down there, I'm not, we're gonna lose funding uh or we're gonna lose uh some part of our organization that we're gonna lose their good feelings towards us. Uh there's loss everywhere. Again, because if you're leading well, you're incurring losses. And so, but loss produces anxiety. Um, that's what loss, that's what anxiety is, is the fear of a future loss. And so the the higher you rise in leadership up to the CEO role, you are incurring more and more loss, like we said. And therefore you are incurring more and more anxiety. You're incurring anxiety personally because you're creating loss, and some of that loss is gonna be borne by you in terms of people liking you or you not doing something you really wanted to do, uh, but isn't mission aligned. So you're gonna be incurring loss, and that and people below you are gonna be experiencing loss. And so you're gonna be experiencing your own anxiety, and the rest of the organization is going to be experiencing anxiety. It's there's gonna be personal anxiety, there's gonna be system anxiety, like when a whole system is sort of uh wrapped in anxious uh patterns and culture. That's a real thing. Like you, organizational culture can be an anxious culture. To be a great manager, including a great CEO that's managing the whole organization, you need to learn how to manage anxiety, both for yourself in you, and also in your organization. What's the opposite of anxiety? The common answer is peace or serenity. I don't think that's I mean, there's some truth to that, but that's not really the opposite of anxiety, I would say, of anxiety, because uh if anxiety is incurred by the presence of some future loss you fear, serenity is simply just that that loss doesn't exist. And very rarely are we ever in a situation in our organizational life or in our, frankly, in our personal life where loss or the prospect of loss doesn't exist. So I don't, it's commonly assumed peace, you know, a calm is the outcome of anxiety. I don't actually think that's true. I think the opposite of anxiety is holding. So if anxiety is, I fear a loss, and then I would add to that, it's not only the fear of loss, but you are trying to avoid loss. I uh in my book, I say anxiety equals loss times avoidance. Uh, anxious behaviors are trying to, you know, make that loss go away. Uh, and that's why we get into anxiety loops, is because ultimately that particular loss we can't make go away. So what we need to replace avoidance with is holding, is holding the loss, being able to just bear it and help other people bear it and grieve. And there's a lot of holding practices we can talk about, but one of them that's often not really talked about is grief. Like grin we need to grieve a personal loss like the death of a loved one, but organizations experience loss and those need to be grieved as well. And the CEO has to, and when that happens, has to also take on the role of chief grieving officer.

The Role of Grief in Leadership

Adam Jeske 29:23

Are there other ways that uh in your experience, CEOs can manage anxiety well, other practices? What how would you advise a a newer CEO on how to uh put tools in that particular toolbox?

Personal Growth for Effective Leadership

Embracing Anxiety as an Opportunity

Curtis Chang 29:44

They have to be growing themselves, personally, in my worldview, spiritually, um uh because it it it's it has to be rooted in them. They can't lead an organization through anxiety. And again, not away from anxiety. It's not making it go away, but through it. They can't lead people through it as they if they can't go through it themselves. They have to do the personal work. And there's a lot of versions of how you do this uh meditation, therapy, just self-help. I mean, there's just a lot of ways, but you have to do for whatever way that you do personal growth work, you got to do the work because it just has to emanate from your very being. Yeah. And then I think how you lead organizations through through it, uh I can't explain all of it, or because one, it's very complex. And two, you know, you can read the book, you can uh take or if you're in the Bay Area, you can take our take get into our cohort uh and take that class. But but let me may maybe give you a snippet of of that answer. I think one of it is just naming uh the anxiety. Uh it's a fallacy for a leader, a CEO, to think they have to project this image of inflapable, uh imperturbable sort of calm, right? Uh it that that is not congruent, probably, with their inner reality. Um, and so you're having a dissonance in your own personal self between your inner reality and your outer reality as a leader. So it creates dissonance, but it also creates dissonance in your organization because they are feeling anxiety. And you, by not acknowledging, not um recognizing in yourself and naming that, like you create dissonance in them because they're feeling anxious, but they they're getting the message, I can't feel this way, uh, either unconsciously or sometimes consciously by the leader, because the leader is like, oh, I don't want my people to be anxious because that makes me anxious. So let me shut that down as fast as I can. So I think a key way a CEO leads their organization is one, doing their personal work, and then two, allowing anxiety to be present, not to dominate, not to, and certainly not as something that they have to make go away, but just as something you got to go through. Uh you got to go through it in your personal life. You got to go through it in your organizational life. And that's why I really think it's important, you know, in my book, I call it the anxiety opportunity, not the anxiety problem, because it's an opportunity. And if if a leader, and that maybe that's the third thing that I would say is look for the opportunity for growth by going through that anxiety.

Recommended Reads for Leaders

Adam Jeske 32:28

Curtis, let's go to some lightning round, quick response questions. What is a book or two that have been meaningful to you, formational for you and your leadership, or that you find yourself recommending to others in the sector? And bonus points if it is uh an uncommon recommendation.

Curtis Chang 32:47

Sure. Uh I will start with what is a common uh recommendation, and I think is maybe recognized by somebody, uh, by some listeners out there. And that is a book uh called Managing Transition by, I believe it's William Bridges. It's a great book because precisely it names that a key leadership move in managing transitions is naming the loss. Um, because any important transition or pivot, again, like I said, involves loss. So one of the things I love about it is it has it recognizes that truth and it gives some fairly practical advice and guidance and frameworks on how to name that loss organizationally and move people through it. So that's that's one I would highly recommend. And then um, gosh, one that's not, I will have to go with something that um is from my particular worldview, my spiritual worldview, which is Krishna. Um, and that's a bunch of books that are about grief. I mentioned earlier that grieving is a critical way we hold loss. Rather than avoiding it, we we hold it, we just possess it. And so um, there's a number of books that I've really appreciated, mostly that involve grieving the loss, not of some organizational change, but the grieving loss of personal loss of death, especially. Yeah. Uh there's a book by C.S. Lewis, famous Christian writer called A Grief Observed. Um, Timothy Keller, Tim Keller, a very well-known Christian pastor and writer who passed away himself several years ago, has a book called On Death. Um and so, yeah, I happen to really, it's it's it maybe sounds a bit macabre, but I think uh observing, processing, um, thinking about loss of all sorts, um, I think is helpful.

Adam Jeske 34:44

Is there something about your leadership that if other CEOs watched you for a day or a week, would say, that's really unconventional, the way Curtis does that?

Connecting Personal Calling with Organizational Needs

Curtis Chang 34:55

Uh I would not presume that I have something unique or distinctive to all the great leaders out there. So I think that would be that I try as much as possible to connect the work that somebody is doing for under me in my organization, or the or a work that I'm inviting them to do, or sometimes telling them to do. But mostly I try to invite them to it. And the way I really try to do this is by already having built a sense of their own conception of their personal calling. And by personal calling, I mean their sense of what they were made to do, what they were put on this earth. Again, in my worldview, they were created by God to do as best as they can understand it, which transcends what they do functionally for my organization in this moment in time. It's a it's the North Star, it's a long arc. It's it should be something that holds them on a course through not just their work in my organization, but previous organizations or the next organization they work for. And I try as much as possible not to lead people as like functional tools or widgets for me to feed into my organization in a mechanistic way to churn out the input I do. I try to go in the other direction as well. Uh, and and that you have to do that. You have to like align people's work with what the organization needs. I'm not saying you don't do that, but I also try to, in addition to that work, which is just common and any leader is wired and incentivized to do, is to go from this person to how they meet organization needs. I try to integrate that with an understanding and exploration of how the organizational need that I'm trying to get them to meet is also feeding into their personal calling. And that that's you know, how is this you taking on this project uh going to actually further your sense of calling as say uh somebody that can uh build community, right? You've you've all of your work, you've your leader, your previous job and and what you tell me you really love about your current role is you are a community builder. So how can I, first of all, direct them to an organizational need that is about that, and then articulate that and in intensify that, uh, surface that even more so that they're really understanding this next role, not as, well, I got to do it because Curtis tells tells me to do it or the organization needs me to do it, but really as something that's that connects deeply to their own long-term sense of why they're in the world. So um I don't think that's a framework that's very common out there. I think the standard, you know, kind of conception of a good great manager is like I get people to do what the organization needs. And um, I'm not sure, I'm sure I'm not the only person that does this. And some people may do this instinctively, but just not know they're doing it. But but building that that bridge. I mean, one way to think about this is that um management theory originated by thinking about organiz about people as widgets, as inputs on a conveyor belt meeting the needs of organizations. That's the origin of management theory. Management theory began in the 19th century with the rise of large industrial organizations for the first time, uh, railroads, uh, railroad building, coal, to, you know, mining and refining to feed those railroads, steelmakers. These are suddenly large organizations. So management theory, you know, there's no such thing as really management theory before the 19th century. It grew out of industrialization. And people may recognize the name Frederick Taylor, who is the father of modern management theory. And he, you know, he's famous for the stopwatch that's trying to measure the shortest amount of time a worker needs to do to lay that widget down. And so the worker becomes a widget, you know, measured for efficiency on a conveyor belt going towards meeting organizational need. What I'm talking about is thinking about management not as making more efficient a conveyor belt in which people are inputs, but really as a bridge. And a bridge has direct traffic going in both directions. So it's not just the person as a uh sort of somebody on a car, if you will, or walking to feed and meet an organizational need on the other side. You have personal calling on one end, organizational need on the other. The traffic doesn't just go in that direction. A bridge, the beauty of a bridge is it facilitates traffic in both directions. So we're also, as a great manager, facilitating traffic from the or an existing organizational need to how does that feed into personal calling?

Adam Jeske 39:57

Curtis Chang, Executive Director of Good Faith, what do you love about your work?

Curtis Chang 40:03

Uh I love my work because it has me, it what I just said, it feeds into my own personal calling. Uh it's something that grew out of my sense of what I was made to do and what the world needs. Uh and when you you can have that, you know, what what you were created, your gifts, your yearnings, your longings, and then some actual need in the world. Uh when personal calling meets your longings for the world, that's uh that's a great place to be in. So I think that's what I love about most about what I do.

Adam Jeske 40:36

Curtis, thank you for joining us on the Nonprofit CEO podcast. It's been a pleasure. Everyone, if you know a nonprofit CEO or executive director who's carrying something significant, send them the show. And if you want more of the patterns I'm seeing across hundreds of CEO conversations, you need the Nonprofit CEO briefing delivered weekly at nonprofit CEO.com. I'm Adam Jeski, the Nonprofit CEO Advisor. Thank you for what you're leading.