What I’m Thinking
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Credits and opinions are my own unless otherwise annotated.
This work reflects my own values and perspectives, which may not reflect the perspectives of colleagues, clients, or other stakeholders connected to me.
AI has been utilized for fact-checking and monitor for errors only.
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What I’m Reading
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ON LEADERSHIP
What I Think About When I Think About Leadership
Deborah Collins, CEO Virtual-Executives.com
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The phrase “360 leadership” often conjures images of assessment tools, feedback loops, and competency charts. At core, it is a methodology—a full-circle approach to evaluating a leader’s effectiveness from every angle: supervisors, peers, direct reports, and themselves (self). This traditional model is valuable, particularly to surface blind spots and build accountability.
Can 360 Leadership be more than a corporate scorecard? Can it be a personal practice of self-awareness? What if Leadership itself were a verb?
What Is Leadership?
For me, to lead is not a matter of title or tenure. It is not the endgame of a career ladder or the reward for politics played well. Leadership is something you do. It is the everyday decision to take ownership, to act with integrity, and to bring others with you—to effect outcomes through and with others—through vision setting, through listening, through courage to take a leap and to take advice.
So, when I think about 360 Leadership, I always think of leadership as a verb. I strive to lead with awareness in every direction, and I look for it when I interview candidates for senior positions. What am I looking for?
• Inward reflection - where values shape behaviors.
• Outward engagement toward others - where behaviors build trust.
• Future state narratives - where values and behaviors inspire and shape outcomes.
This framework complements the traditional approach to leadership. How do we consistently demonstrate the way we lead - up, across, and down? Is it grounded in a daily practice of self-awareness and action with intentional integrity?
The Quiet Origin of Leadership
We often think leadership starts when someone else recognizes us and our work. I would suggest the origin is quieter—more a private act of asking ourselves uncomfortable questions:
• Am I living the way that I want to lead?
• Am I taking responsibility for the way I engage with others?
• Am I taking steps to avoid unintended harm to others as I work towards my goals?
These are not philosophical but practical diagnostics—simple (but not easy) yes/no questions. We lead others from our own lens: what we stand for, what we want, what lights our mornings, what nourishes us.
Beyond the Ladder
Leadership is often commoditized, sold as a promotion, a title, a step higher in power or authority in exchange for performance metrics. In my experiences, those metrics have often been rewarded through one-sided internal mechanisms without asking equally measurable questions, “at what cost” or “at whose expense”. In my view, leadership is not a process of stepping toward the top of a structure—whether that is an org chart or a corner office. It is a daily act of choice and clarity. It shows up in the conversations we have, the examples we set, and the boundaries we hold.
Reframing the Plan
Let’s reframe career planning—not as plotting a path to status reward, but as creating a life that aligns with our values. Of all the things you could do, which ones will make you proud to say: I did that? Of all the people you could do them with, who brings out your best?
These questions lead to actions. Intentional actions, repeated consistently, in front of—or on behalf of—others. To me, this is leadership.
Closing Reflection: What Will You Do?
Leadership is a verb. It is a practice. It is being the kind of leader who reflects inward, connects outward, and moves with intention and integrity in every direction. You don’t need a new title. You need a new question, and the courage to take one clear, honest step in response to start your journey.
You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to lead yourself—one step at a time. Make space. Ask better questions. Choose engagement over obligation. Collective encouragement to elevate everyone demonstrates your core self as a leader.
Leadership does not end with you—it starts with you. You are part of a chain: emulating the leaders who inspired and motivated you and becoming the leader who inspires and motivates others to lead. That is 360 Leadership. A full circle. A living verb. A daily practice of stepping up, reaching back, and moving forward—in an intentional cycle of self-awareness and learning in every direction.
How are you thinking differently about your role as a leader, what would you do differently based on what you have learned through your own growth towards or in your current role as a leader?
For those of us supporting organizations behind the scenes, coaching and hiring for resilient leadership is often the most meaningful work we can do.
If you thought this article was helpful or could interest others, please give us a 'like' and share – thank you!
Let’s connect if you or your organization need support on leadership, resilience, or organizational planning:
Deborah Collins is CEO of Virtual-Executives.com
Deborah has been a leader in the nonprofit space for 20+ years focused on interim executive leadership and recruitment. Virtual-Executives.com supports nonprofits, social enterprise and philanthropic institutions to plan and implement the next phase of their work.
Are you reading this article on the Virtual-Executives.com website? Then you are eligible for a 30-minute free consultation. Send us a message and schedule your 30-minute free discussion.
ON LEADERSHIP
The Anchors of Shared Leadership
Deborah Collins, CEO Virtual-Executives.com
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Once upon a time, long ago, I picked up a book that shifted the way I thought about leadership: Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership by Bradford and Cohen. Its central distinction between “managing and directing” and “inspiring and guiding” the people who do the work was revelatory to me in my early days running a business and managing staff.
Managing meant outputs, systems, and accountability. Inspiring meant engagement, motivation, and shared purpose. I learned that both were necessary, and the real power for the business emerged through the active daily balancing act between “managing and directing” with “inspiring and guiding”.
Decades later, I find myself circling back to this book, this time with a sharper sense of my work as a consultant working with nonprofit leaders. Many ‘learning moments’ later, I still see the real power of any organization in the active play between “managing and directing” and “inspiring and guiding”.
Retiring Heroic Leadership
Leadership theory evolves as workplaces evolve. External disruptors, y’know the usual pandemics, natural disasters, workforce shifts, reshape our organizations. Leadership practices, however, typical take time to catch up.
Bradford and Cohen described the “post-heroic leader,” one who felt compelled to be all, know all, and solve all problems. I still see some leaders today trying to fit this mold. It’s not always those who are new to leadership or new to managing teams.
In my view and observations of many leaders: no one person can sit at the center of all decision-making, all knowledge management, and all course direction. Traits often associated with founder’s syndrome surface in many traditional CEOs or leaders, exhibiting a blend of ‘heroic leader’ and ‘founder’ behaviors. The result is a tricky cocktail for boards and staff to manage. Today’s organizations are too complex, external disruptors too interconnected, and teams often too broadly distributed for a single leader to hold everything together successfully. Rather than serving the business as the center of all knowledge and direction, a lone leader atop their organization is more likely to become a single point of failure (SPF) and a hindrance to organizational resilience.
Bridging Old and New Habits
There are two traditional approaches I carry with me through each leadership role and through each client engagement.
First, decision-making frameworks such as RACI, MOCHA, DACI or whichever model suits the organization. The specific model matters less than the discipline of defining roles clearly.
Clarity, Cadence, and Communication depend on, and are each served by, our ability to devolve decision making that would otherwise sit solely with a singular CEO.
Second, Marshall Goldsmith’s reminder: “What got you here won’t get you there.” This resonates me continuously through every client engagement as they navigate towards their future state—towards a new CEO, a new operating structure, or other new phase in their organization’s evolution.
I also return to these approaches when I find myself holding too much. My bold aspirations are easy to articulate, but my own habits can also be threaded through many of my every day activities. We are all stuck until we each choose to see ourselves in our new state.
Three Anchors in Shared Leadership: Clarity, Cadence, Communication
Blending observation, theory, and practice, I’ve come to rely on three anchors that support successful shared leadership and feedback loop: clarity, cadence, and communication.
Clarity. People thrive when they understand their functional roles and when they know they are stepping outside of their roles to help others. Clear expectations reduce anxiety. Clear boundaries prevent overreach. When clarity exists, collaboration flourishes because everyone knows where they stand, and accountability can thrive when team members are clear about what they own. Decision frameworks like RACI, MOCHA, DACI, or RAPID and others are useful models to support staff and leaders who and/or when there is overreach or holding back or a lack of understanding around who steps in and when, particularly if a skill set is missing from a start-up or growing staff.
Cadence. Teams need rhythm, not just deadlines but a sense of flow—when meetings happen, how feedback is shared, how work cycles align. Cadence creates predictability, which creates space for the inevitable ‘things that land from the moon.’ Without cadence, small disruptions feel overwhelming. With cadence, teams feel in control and aligned—the rhythm of the business is evident to everyone, and the organization feels like its firing on all cylinders.
Communication. We all process information differently: verbal, visual, narrative, scenario-based. Shared leadership means communicating in ways that support the recipient’s ability to understand their role and contribution. It also means being intentional about creating multiple avenues for voices to be heard and ideas to surface. Leaders don’t need all the answers, but they do need to create conditions where answers can emerge.
To some traditional leaders, offering more vs less communication feels messy or risky, however, when clarity and cadence are in place communication becomes an opportunity to collaborate and iterate, and a way to create buy-in and understanding. As the team becomes ready to set clarity and cadence around decision making and process, RACI or similar model and timelines are established and communicated, creating a shared framework to communicate.
Normalizing Shared Leadership
Similar to successful organizational structure and ‘habits’, leadership behaviors also require clarity, cadence, and communication. We say what we plan to do; we do what we say we’ll do. Repeat. We nourish behaviors we want to see in ourselves and others. We model “inspiring and guiding” not once a year at a retreat but in the flow of everyday work.
What strikes me now, more than twenty years after first reading Power Up, is how central shared leadership has become. We no longer need to treat it as radical or experimental. We can design workplaces where inspiring and guiding are not extras but integral or standard to how work can get done.
Of all the activities that CEOs and leaders “own”, leaders are responsibility for shaping workplaces where people want to contribute their best, and to support by ensuring and facilitating clarity, cadence, and communication through all that makes each team member’s contributions meaningful.
Closing Reflection: What Will You Do?
Looking back across decades of practice and the books that shaped me as a leader, I see that leadership is about habits practiced in public. What we repeat, we normalize. What we normalize, we scale.
Do we do what we say we do? Or do we say what we want while we do something else?
If we want workplaces where people are inspired and guided, not just managed and directed, then it seems to me that we ought to practice those habits ourselves. Walk the Talk. Daily. We don’t need to discard everything that came before us—we need to use it to inform and enrich the leadership approach that we want to demonstrate and infuse into our own leaders of tomorrow.
For those of us supporting organizations behind the scenes, coaching and hiring for resilient leadership is often the most meaningful work we can do.
If you thought this article was helpful or could interest others, please give us a 'like' and share – thank you!
Let’s connect if you or your organization need support on leadership, resilience, or organizational planning:
Deborah Collins is CEO of Virtual-Executives.com
Deborah has been a leader in the nonprofit space for 20+ years focused on interim executive leadership and recruitment. Virtual-Executives.com supports nonprofits, social enterprise and philanthropic institutions to plan and implement the next phase of their work.
ON LEADERSHIP
Beyond Uncertainty: Designing For Resilience
Deborah Collins, CEO Virtual-Executives.com
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Nonprofit Leadership writing is full of thoughtful contributions about navigating complexity, leading through change, and steering organizations through uncertain times. These ideas as a collective mindset over the years offers guideposts during periods of disruption and transition. What follows is not a rebuttal to those frameworks, but an evolution in my own thinking.
After years working with organizations at different stages—launching, stabilizing, reimagining themselves. I have come to believe that sustainable leadership is not only about how we respond to uncertainty, but how we prepare to move towards it and through it with steadiness and purpose.
Resilience, from this lens, becomes less about reacting in the moment and more about designing for long-range continuity. When I look at the organizations that have weathered disruption with grace and / or coherence, two foundational traits stand out:
1. Consistent Support
The first trait is a grounded belief in your stakeholders. Your organization offers has enduring value. Even as the form or context may shift around your work, your core—your supporters, advocates, and stakeholders—see themselves connected to your organization through each step.
This is not the same as chasing a way to fit in the current conversation or remain relevant around short-term demand. In the nonprofit and NGO spaces, the parallel is in establishing confidence in a fundamental understanding of your services and the relationships that sustain them. The most resilient organizations cultivate an engaged community around the mission—the reason for being—not simply a list of activities and short-term offerings.
Effective organizations move beyond an annual calendar of broadcasts to intentionally building relational communications and engagement. This kind of long-term relationship-building supports mission alignment and strategic continuity. When an organization understands its community deeply, it can adapt programs, shift messaging, and reallocate resources—without losing its footing and without losing trust or support.
Trust as a key result is particularly evident when paired with the second trait.
2. Look to the Horizon, even on Calm Days
The second trait is a habit of horizon scanning—call it environmental scanning, or even just planning(!)
This work is ongoing. We continually prepare for rather than react to disruptions. This has long been understood as a hallmark of organizational resilience.
What feels sharper to me now, post-pandemic and in light of other external shocks and disruption to the NGO space, is how often the responsibility and expertise of planning is assumed but not explicitly embedded. There is a quiet, almost unspoken expectation that COOs, CFOs, or executive directors will naturally possess a clear-eyed understanding of risk and continuity. Yet I see this expertise as little more than one line among other activities on a job description. In some cases, the need for these skills built implicitly into one function can even feel contradictory, for example when a CEO’s risk tolerance is, perhaps necessarily, higher than that of their COO or CFO. Without open dialogue and alignment between the CEO and leadership as equals within the context of risk management, the very functions meant to steady an organization can end up siloed or sidelined.
3. Bending And Flexing: Iteration as Process
It is tempting to view growth as a smooth arc—build, launch, scale. NonProfits are messy. Most organizations grow in waves—cyclical and funding-dependent, and with accompanying levels of risk. Nonprofits are scrappy. They can adjust, pivot, reset, and try again. I have come to see these cycles not as failures but as evidence of a living system for every organization.
The organizations that endure are the ones that iterate with intention. They let go of tactics that no longer serve, recalibrate around their audience, continually return to their values with renewed clarity. This adaptability, grounded in purpose and open to ideation and iteration, is a skillset in itself.
We spend much time reflecting on the challenges and obstacles to build an organization. How much time do we spend protecting it? Risk management and business resilience includes financial planning, yes, but also strategic pacing, role design, knowledge transfer, and staff care.
Organizations that prioritize these areas early on are more likely to remain mission-aligned when pressure rises. Their ability to flex without panic becomes a key marker of leadership maturity.
Building organizational resilience is rarely achieved without support. Whether through interim leadership, external facilitation, or a fresh operational lens, sustainable organizations often bring in new capacity at just the right moment—sometimes to fix something broken, sometimes to reinforce what’s working, and always to ensure it continues under new conditions.
A way forward is to normalize risk management and the distribution of environmental scanning across all leadership and management roles as a collective accountability—effectively normalizing organizational foresight and resilience. Rather than business continuity as a compliance box to check annually or assume one member of your leadership team has it covered, invest in planning and environmental scanning as a shared discipline, adjusting plans to the lens of each leader’s portfolio. Each leader tracks the knock-on effects of external disruptors to their own portfolios in relation to the mission and strategic goals or the larger organization. When considering the crises of recent years and the long lead-times before they eventually manifested—pandemic, surprise government elections, housing bubbles, Brexit and other geopolitical disruptors—how much time were we allocating to scenario planning for external disruptors? How often did we as colleagues collectively practice looking ahead together to identify and monitor potential issues to our businesses?
A Thought on the Language We Use
Reflecting on this, I have also become more attuned to the language we use in leadership conversations. Phrases like “leading through uncertainty” or “managing volatility” or “now more than ever” are still valuable in some circumstances. I wonder if they sometimes encourage a short-term posture and distance us from the work at hand? There is a sense to me that the job of leadership is to get through this next wave, this next campaign, this next strategic plan, rather than to build for the long haul.
As CEOs and leaders, we are the captains of our ship—small and large—navigating challenging seas. As we look to the horizon to ensure we stay on course no matter the rough seas, we must also remember that we have souls aboard the ships we steer. Rather than ‘resources’, I think of these souls as colleagues who are thrown around in the choppy waters with us, and who are relying on us to direct their efforts well so that we all survive as a team.
What I have found useful, especially in my own consulting work, is shifting the conversation toward continuity and resilience. What would it mean to plan for coherence, rather than respond to chaos? To design internal people-centered systems not just to react, but to endure?
That shift does not diminish the importance of agility or taking pride in being nimble to respond to the ‘now.’ It simply invites a broader framework—one that includes foresight, care, and a rhythm to the business, as leadership tools in their own right.
Closing Reflection: What Will You Do?
Organizations that endure rarely do so by accident. They are built with care, adjusted with humility, and supported by a deep understanding of their value and their people. That understanding does not eliminate uncertainty, but it does offer a kind of internal ballast—something to guide decisions and sustain momentum even when external conditions shift.
How are you thinking differently about your organization’s future based on what you have learned through its recent past? If your organization is navigating questions of resilience and you’d like guidance, let’s connect.
For those of us supporting organizations behind the scenes, coaching and hiring for resilient leadership is likely the most meaningful work we can do.
If you thought this article was helpful or could interest others, please give us a 'like' and share – thank you!
Let’s connect if you or your organization need support on leadership, resilience, or organizational planning:
Deborah Collins is CEO of Virtual-Executives.com
Deborah has been a leader in the nonprofit space for 20+ years focused on interim executive leadership and recruitment. Virtual-Executives.com supports nonprofits, social enterprise and philanthropic institutions to plan and implement the next phase of their work.
This section remains the last section, so My Reading entry should be the last item I want the reader to see.
Then the right hand side is the accordion entries of What I’m Reading.
Credits and opinions belong to the authors.
I read these works because I value the authors’ perspectives, not because they are paid or otherwise connected to me.