How Smart Nonprofit Leaders Create Lasting Impact: Meg Pitman
In this time of overwhelm, where many staff and leaders of nonprofit organizations are leaving the field or those who have stayed are truly running on empty, I went looking for leaders who have figured something out.
The good news is: I found them! This series, How Smart Nonprofit Leaders Create Lasting Impact, shares the insights of amazing people who continue to navigate the ups and downs of nonprofit leadership to create lasting impact. This is one of the many ways we help clients of Development Without Limits keep their amazing staff doing great work without wasting time, energy and money on quick fixes that fail.
What a fun, upbeat conversation with the “tenaciously optimistic” Meg Pitman from Boys and Girls Clubs of America. As a smart nonprofit leader, Meg rejects hierarchical team structures and has gone all-in with a flat leadership style. It has paid off! Meg and team are making a lasting impact with quality youth development initiatives.
Q: What has been the biggest factor in your success in creating lasting impact?
I am fortunate to be very good at hiring amazing people. I have been surrounded by teams of people who are tenaciously optimistic about social change. And that has been really key.
I think people stay with me because I run flat teams that aren't hierarchical. I just listen to everybody's voice equally. That's how we do it. So, for me, the biggest factor in my success has been working with dynamic people who are optimistic.
The world is really hard right now, and if one of us has a day where we're like, “Holy smokes, what has happened?” The other members of the team usually can anchor each other and help them up. We take turns doing that. That has allowed me to get through. Those teams are crucial to me staying in the field and to making sure the work is landing like it should be.
Q: What kinds of things have you been able to accomplish with your teams?
One of my tenants is: Don't do anything that doesn't have fun in it. I'm a firm believer that fun can be infused into even the hardest conversations or the hardest work. With that context, I recently ran a team that reached the largest youth program quality scale of any organization nationally. We partnered with Weikart who were awesome. Everybody involved in the mix was fun and funny. We hit times where we were traveling at 90%--this was before COVID happened. But as we were looking back, we were laughing that we were actually traveling at 90%. At the time, it never occurred to us that it was insane. And we never had a day where we weren't excited to do the work. Because we would get into the field and there would be a lot of play, fun and dynamic conversations. When you embed fun into things, it creates a safe space. That team was one of the best teams I've worked with. They were amazing. We had this massive scale with over 2500 sites doing the youth program quality work. And we did it through fun. I mean, there was a lot of play in the mix. So it never occurred to us that traveling 90% was insane.
Q: Can you talk more about the teams you lead–are they internal or external?
I tend to run teams where outside partnership is part of the work. I'm a big fan of partnering because that's where the best ideas come from. So we share our good ideas, and other people share their good ideas. Recently, we partnered with Playworks for some really awesome work that's landing well in clubs. And you know, they're the king of fun. So they came in and ratcheted our fun up a level. So yeah, the work tends to win when people are having a good time. I believe fun is an antidote to trauma. And so it's been really useful to have a team like that and to be surrounded by people who are committed to bringing joy to work.
Q: So, what kinds of challenges or obstacles are you seeing? It sounds like you don't let anything get you down.
Realistically, every now and then something gets you down. My first job was at Nike in their community affairs division. My supervisor wrote my first recommendation letter for the job I took after that, and her compliment was that I was “tenaciously positive”. So I try to maintain that.
The past two years have challenged that greatly. And so I've realized that I'm sharing joy and letting other people take the lead. And joy is restful for me sometimes, too. So I figured out that balance between driving joy and allowing others to step to the plate so I can rest. And that's been key for me.
“Yes, I’m going to be in this work for a long time, but I don’t always have to be driving because I’m sharing that responsibility with the team. ”
You asked about barriers or things that have been hard. In our work, it's been staff turnover. And also the racial justice work. I’ve been very conscious of how it affects our team members. For example, don't make people who have to do the (racial justice) work 24/7 in their day, do the work for the entire organization. My team has been very conscious about explicitly having those conversations, stepping up to do the work and thinking about how members of the team who don't have to live it 24/7 can step to the plate can manage our peers around it or help our peers rise to the challenge. So that's been key.
Q: And so what are some specific things you've been doing?
We have done a lot of work and conversations around white people doing their work and having a space to do that without burdening people of color in that work. And then that conversation grew into other spaces, like LGBT work, although that is a little bit different, or disability work. And that's been a little bit different. But in every space, everybody is more conscious. I can step up and have some of those hard racial conversations in big group settings, or ask the hard questions and push a little more.
Sometimes I can see on my team where somebody wants to say something, but maybe they're not in a position or don't feel safe saying it. As a leader, I take it upon myself to say those things. And that has shown up in a really interesting way lately. I have MS. And so I have a disability-perspective on things. And I stepped up to say something. And then my team stepped up behind me and challenged some COVID protocols that were not inclusive. At that point I realized, “Oh, wait, I also have backup now.” So it's been really cool and bonding for us as humans to do the work together and figure out where one group steps up and where one group just can rest a little bit. Because that balance between the fight and the rest is critical. I think we've all realized that in the last two or three years.
Q: So if it all works out where your team is speaking up, and really moving the work forward, especially as it relates to racial justice, DEI and belonging, what does that look like for you as a leader in your organization?
You know, I think we saw this in the quality work. We did an interesting thing where we centered people with lived experience. And that taught me a lot because in doing that, all of a sudden, we were hearing from not only people or families or partners that traditionally don't get included in a decision making process, and we were hearing from different levels of the organization. They were engaged in strategy decisions.
So if the data was about a bus driver, that bus driver was in the conversation about how to make change for the program or the organization. We found better solutions. For example, if the kids are showing up and they're having problems during this time, you pull different levels of the organization in and they have the perspective that yeah, by the time the kids get on the bus, they're wound up because lining up looks like this. So that ended up as a behavior thing. We never would have gotten perspectives like that if we just had the strategy being made at the senior level. It also showed up on a meta level, because we took that information and we drove it up through BGCA. Now, our leaders are making decisions that are relevant to the field, where we have voices all along that continuum.
It also levels the playing field for organization. For example, we would work with a native club with not a lot of capacity because of funding and their rural location. We'd work at the big organization who's super well-resourced, too. Often, that smaller club did things that elevated youth voice because their staff capacity was lower. So they have their youth doing the program assessments for example. They just automatically embedded youth voice.
“Every time we elevate and center voices of people who have the lived experience, our decisions as organizations are better, and our work is more meaningful as individuals. ”
Q: How are you ensuring that everyone across the country, across your whole network benefits from the things that you're learning?
We have a team that does data insights. That's one way that we share on a standard level. The best way to do it is communities of practice–clubs hearing directly from clubs. We (at the national level) don't have good proximity to the ground level community issues and the leaders at the clubs will talk to each other.
We have one initiative going on right now, where a funder is funding both Detroit and Las Vegas, who have very different models for innovation. They are sharing and cross-breeding these solutions for trauma informed work and racial justice. And it is cool; it is better than anything we would have come up with at the national organization. Then we highlight those best practices wherever we can share that communication.
Q: So facilitating communities of practice is just part of the regular practice?
Yeah, our quality networks are communities of practice. Going into it, the idea was that the bigger, well resourced organizations would share with the smaller organizations. And what we we found was a way more equitable thing happening where the small guys were super innovative, they could move faster. And so sometimes they will get ahead in the work and share with the larger organizations. That's been fun to watch. Communities of practice are key–I learned a ton in those meetings.
Q: In your opinion, what is the secret sauce to leadership that creates long lasting impact that a lot of people miss? Something that you don't necessarily get in the college course or even in the first several years of leading… maybe even other peers would look back and they wouldn't say this thing, but what for you is the secret sauce?
I think the secret sauce for me has been the flat team. I don't lead with the title. In fact, I'm well known for just showing up and being like: Hey, I'm Meg. Let's figure out how to solve this problem.
What that does is create a safe environment where more voices are heard, and people feel more comfortable to share.
So everybody on my team knows my opinion is equal to their opinion. And, I value and expect people to speak up and disrupt and push. Actually, disruption is key. If you're going to be on my team, you have to come into the office and be like, “Dude, that's the worst idea I've ever heard.” Then I'll be like, “Cool, what's a better one? Or how can we tweak this?”
So you know what that results in is me having to answer this question. When staff leave for a different job, I’m asked, “Would you hire this person again?” And my standard response is, “No, because I'll be working for that person.” I'm constantly trying to replace myself. I'm not interested in sitting in a title and holding on to a position. I really want staff who are going to know that they can vote me out of a position or if something comes I'm going to create an opportunity for them to rise. I think every one of my staff feels that investment in them.
Q: Could you talk a little bit more about what managing and leading a flat team really looks like?
My team knows that I will only use my title to block and tackle for them. That is the job of a title. It is nothing more in an organization and then externally, could be fore positioning. It is not my job to have the good ideas, I hire really smart people. My job is to make space for their brilliant ideas to come to life. So that may look like me pushing against senior leaders to create time, space or funding for specific initiatives. And the quality networks were exactly that– We asked: what do we need to do to get quality scaled? I said, we need some pilot sites, and presented all my staff's ideas. That’s how we created the quality networks.
I also have a principle that the people who do the work, talk about the work. If you are doing the work, you talk about it. And so, I'll get people who maybe aren't comfortable public speaking, but by the time they're done with me, they're super comfortable presenting their ideas and answering questions.
Q: It sounds like a lot of your leadership work is almost like staff development?
Yeah, it is. We do youth development, and it's just staff development. It's human development. We develop humans, whether that's happening with the six year old or 60 year old. It's all development. So if you love that, and you know how that works, you should be really good at managing a team. Sometimes we forget that when we’re working with adults. Or we think you have to have some bravado, but it's really just the same as what we do with youth. Working with adults, you also want elevated voice; you want people to feel respected. You want self efficacy, and you need some sense of influence. And that's the same thing across the board.
Thank you, Meg! I really appreciated the conversation!
Meg Pitman, Boys & Girls Clubs of America
Meg Pitman currently serves as the National Director of Partnerships and Collaboration for Boys & Girls Clubs of America and has spent the last twenty years developing expertise in youth development impact measurement and program quality, collective impact, and social and emotional learning. She is well known in youth development and education settings as a tenaciously positive leader who is able to mobilize divergent groups around collaborative change initiatives for youth and families. Meg received her Bachelor’s degree in psychology from Lewis & Clark College and a Master’s in Social Work from the University of Michigan School of Social. When Meg isn’t in the Youth Development trenches you can find her looking for Orcas off the island she lives on in Washington state or practicing ‘moving meditation’ while snowboarding with her 80 year old dad.
