Build Your RAFT

Build Your RAFT

This has been a season of transition in the Donovan household. We are in the middle of a move. My oldest just walked across a graduation stage. And somewhere in between packing boxes, celebrating milestones, and continuing my working with clients, I found myself reviewing notes from a parent meeting at school that I had missed (the kind designed to help families prepare their kids for the changes ahead) and furiously scribbling thoughts in the margin.

Why the scribbling? Because I am a concerned parent thinking about my first child to graduate and also because I kept thinking about my clients.

The presenter introduced an acronym developed by cross-cultural experts David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken, originally designed to help third culture kids. These are children who grow up between cultures, countries, and communities, navigating the unique grief and disorientation of transition. I missed the meeting itself, but as I reviewed the notes afterward, I could not stop thinking about every Executive Director, Board Chair, and nonprofit leader I have ever worked with who was leaving a role, closing a chapter, or navigating a major organizational shift.

Because here is what I have learned in years of consulting and leadership (and parenting): transition is transition. The feelings do not change much whether you are a twelve-year-old leaving the only country you have ever called home or a twenty-year Executive Director handing over the keys to an organization you built from nothing. The grief is real. The disorientation is real. And without a plan, without a raft, people tend to drift.

So let me introduce you to this RAFT I just learned about.

R: REPAIR

Repair means making things right before you leave. It means choosing forgiveness- both offering it and seeking it- rather than repression. Because here is what happens when we don't: we carry it. We carry the unresolved conflict with a board member into our next role. We carry the grudge against a colleague into our retirement. We carry the guilt of a decision we never fully addressed into the next chapter, and it becomes dead weight on the raft before we have even pushed off from shore.

Transition has a way of surfacing everything we have been quietly avoiding. The relationship that has been strained for two years. The conversation we kept meaning to have but never did. The apology we owe someone or that we are still waiting to receive.

Repair before you go. Not because it is comfortable. Because it is the only way to leave well.

A: AFFIRM

Affirmation means telling the colleagues, board members, staff, volunteers, mentors in your life that you care about them and appreciate them before the transition happens. Don’t do this in a generic farewell email. Be real, be specific, be personal.

The temptation in transition, especially when it has been difficult, is to move forward in anger. To focus on what went wrong, what was left unfinished, who let you down. Anger is understandable. It is also a thief. It steals the opportunity to leave people with something they will carry forward. It rips away the knowledge that their work mattered, that they mattered, that the years were not wasted.  Anger will do the same to you.  

I think about the leaders I have watched leave organizations well. Every single one of them took time to affirm the people around them. And every single one of them was remembered differently better because of it.

Who in your life needs to hear from you before you go?

F: FAREWELL

Farewell means planning enough time and space for a proper goodbye.  This goodbye requires intentionality to make a list of people, of partners, but also of places, of possessions, and to the rhythms and routines that have structured your days. This is the step most nonprofit leaders skip entirely. There is always too much to do, too much to hand off, too much to wrap up. The farewell gets squeezed into a thirty-minute reception with sheet cake and a card everyone signed in the parking lot.

That is not a farewell. That is an escape.  Be intentional about the goodbye. 

A proper farewell acknowledges that something real is ending. It makes space for grief alongside gratitude. It allows the people who loved working with you to say so and allows you to receive it. It is not self-indulgent. It may feel awkward but it is necessary. Organizations that skip the farewell often find that the grief resurfaces anyway, sideways, in the form of resentment toward the new leader or a romanticization of the past that makes moving forward nearly impossible.

Plan the farewell. Give it the time it deserves. Let it be real.

T: THINK TRANSITION

Think Transition means looking ahead. It means learning about and preparing for what comes next instead of staying focused on what is ending. It means acknowledging grief and also having curiosity.  Let’s not deny the loss, but can we consider refusing to let it have the final word?

This is the hardest step for most leaders. Identity is deeply tied to role, especially in the nonprofit world where the work is so personal, so mission-driven, so much a part of who you are. When the role ends, it can feel like you end. This deeply resonates with me because after leaving the organization I led for 8 years as an Executive Director, I found myself with a bit of an identity crisis.  I did not end but sorting through identity requires intention. It requires asking: What is next? What am I curious about? What have I always wanted to learn or do or become that this role never left room for? Where are my gifts?  Who can help me discern what is next? 

Preparation for transition takes time. Succession planning is necessary even before someone plans to leave. It leaves your organization in a better place. It provides clarity in the unexpected circumstances - the sudden resignation, the health crisis, the moment when life moves faster than any of us anticipated. The RAFT is not just for the person leaving. It is for the organization they leave behind.

Think transition. Plan ahead. The river does not end at the bend but maybe it just turns.

For my friends of faith — I want to share something personal.

For the last 16 months, I have kept a print of Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee directly above my desk. Every single day, in the middle of my own season of transition, I have looked up at that painting and asked myself the same question: Where am I right now?

If you know the painting, you know it captures the moment from Mark 4 when the disciples are on the boat in the middle of a violent storm, terrified, while Jesus sleeps in the stern. Rembrandt painted fourteen figures on that boat including thirteen disciples and, many believe, himself. Every figure is in a different posture. Some are frantically working the sails. Some are frozen in fear. Some are clinging to each other. One is looking directly out of the painting and at you as if to ask: what would you do?

That painting has been my companion through transition because it tells the truth about what transition actually feels like. It is not a calm crossing. It is not a gentle float downstream. It is a storm, and everyone on the boat responds differently. This painting reminds me to ask myself daily: where are my eyes in the storm?  Am I intentional on working through my own personal RAFT? 

Repair. Affirm. Farewell. Think Transition.

Build your RAFT before the storm hits. And when it does, and it will, remember who is on the boat with you.

Erin

PS. If your organization is navigating a leadership transition or succession and you are not sure how to do it well, I would love to come alongside you. Leaving well is one of the greatest gifts a leader can give to the organization they love.

You Can't Do This Alone (And You Were Never Supposed To)

Several years into my tenure as an Executive Director, I hit a wall. Not a dramatic, public unraveling - just the slow, quiet kind of exhaustion that creeps in when you have been carrying something too heavy for too long by yourself. The strategic plan needed updating. The board felt disconnected. The staff was stretched. And I, convinced that the mission depended entirely on my ability to hold it all together, had somehow decided that asking for help was a sign of weakness.

I was wrong. I had anxiety during the night to prove it. I longed for Psalm 4:8 - "In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety." But peace, I was learning, does not come to those who insist on carrying alone what was never meant to be carried alone.

I wrote in a previous post about "Me, Myself, and I are not the Holy Trinity" - the dangerous tendency leaders have to operate as if the entire weight of the organization rests on their shoulders alone. Today I want to take that same idea and apply it to the structure of nonprofit leadership itself, because the research is clear, the Scripture is clear, and frankly, my own hard experience is clear: you cannot do this alone, and you were never supposed to.

Nonprofit leadership is uniquely collaborative by design.

Unlike a business, which exists to generate profit for shareholders, a nonprofit exists to serve a mission that benefits the public. That mission is too important and too complex to be carried by any one person or any one group. It requires the board and the Executive Director and the staff and the volunteers, each bringing their distinct gifts, perspectives, and expertise to the table. Not competing. Not duplicating. Collaborating.

The Standards for Excellence Institute, whose framework informs so much of my consulting work, describes collaborative leadership as the capacity to engage people and groups outside one's formal control and inspire them to work toward common goals - despite differences in convictions, cultural values, and operating norms. I love that definition because it does not pretend collaboration is easy. It acknowledges that the people around the table will not always see things the same way. And it says: do it anyway.

What does genuine collaboration actually look like?

It looks like a board that asks great strategic questions instead of managing the day-to-day. It looks like an Executive Director who shares information openly (financials, program outcomes, emerging risks) rather than curating a rosy picture for the board to approve. It looks like staff who feel empowered to bring their full perspective into the work, not just execute orders from the top. It looks like volunteers who are treated as genuine contributors, not just free labor.

It also looks like diversity, real, intentional diversity. Not a board that looks and thinks and comes from the same places, making the same kinds of decisions that have always been made. A board and staff that together reflect the community being served, that includes perspectives and lived experiences that challenge the dominant culture norms, will always make better decisions than a room full of people who all agree with each other. Groupthink is comfortable. It is also dangerous.

And here is the hard truth about collaboration: it requires ego management. It requires the Board Chair who is used to running a company to resist the urge to run the nonprofit the same way. It requires the Executive Director to resist the urge to hoard information or control the narrative. It requires every person at the table to hold their own perspective loosely enough to genuinely consider someone else's. That is not natural. That is discipline.

In Mark 6, Jesus calls the twelve to him and sends them out two by two. Not one by one. Two by two. Henri Nouwen, in Reflections on Christian Leadership, writes that "we cannot bring good news on our own. We are called to proclaim together in community." The concept of two by two, Nouwen says, takes care of leadership loneliness, leadership pride, and the never-ending to-do list. It invites people into collaboration. It reminds us that we are not the Holy Trinity.

I have returned to that passage more times than I can count, as an Executive Director, as a consultant, as a Board Chair sitting across from a leader who is visibly carrying too much alone. The invitation is always the same. You don't have to do this by yourself. You were never meant to.

So what does this mean practically?

It means investing in the relationship between the board and the Executive Director - not just the transaction of reports and approvals, but the genuine partnership of two entities who trust each other enough to be honest. It means building a board that is diverse enough to challenge itself. It means creating structures - committees, clear roles, shared goals - that distribute the work and the wisdom rather than concentrating both at the top.

It means that the next time you are sitting in your office at 9pm, staring at a strategic plan that feels like it is entirely your problem to solve, you stop. And you ask: who else should be in this room?

Is building this kind of collaborative culture easy? No. Is it worth it? Every single time.

You cannot do this alone. And the good news (the really good news) is that you were never supposed to.

Erin

PS. If your organization is struggling with collaboration between board and staff, or if your leadership team is feeling the weight of too much carried by too few, I would love to come alongside you.

Who's Driving This Thing?

I have sat in more board meetings than I can count (as an Executive Director, as a consultant, and as a Board Chair) and one of the most common sources of tension I have witnessed has nothing to do with money, personnel, or strategy. It has everything to do with a much simpler, and much more uncomfortable question: Who is actually in charge here?

It sounds like it should have an obvious answer. It does not.

Early in my career, I watched a well-meaning board member pull a staff person aside after a meeting and assign them a project - completely bypassing the Executive Director. I watched an Executive Director make a major hiring decision without ever looping in the board. I watched a Board Chair show up to a program site unannounced to "check on things." In every case, the people involved genuinely cared about the organization. They were not malicious. They were confused. And confusion, left unaddressed, quietly erodes the trust that makes a nonprofit function.

So let me try to make this as clear as I possibly can.

The board asks "What?" The Executive Director asks "How?"

Governance, the work of the board, is the strategic task of determining what the organization does, what it should become, and what boundaries it operates within. Management, the work of the Executive Director and staff, is figuring out how to get there. How to implement. How to operate. How to execute every policy the board has approved.

Think of it like a road trip. The board decides the destination, sets the budget for gas, and agrees on the rules of the road. The Executive Director gets behind the wheel. Both are essential. But only one person can drive at a time, and everyone needs to know who that is.

This distinction sounds simple. In practice, it is anything but. And here is why: most board members are recruited because of their professional management experience. They are CEOs, lawyers, financial officers, community leaders. They are exceptionally good at the "how." As a former Executive Director, I have struggled personally with this too. Asking them and challenging myself to shift into a governance mindset - to zoom out, ask strategic questions, and not manage - can feel deeply unnatural. It is like asking a chef to come to dinner as a guest and just enjoy the meal. Their instinct is to get back in the kitchen.

So where does the confusion most often show up?

It shows up when a board member contacts staff directly with requests or assignments, bypassing the Executive Director entirely. It shows up when a board votes on operational details that should never have come to the full board in the first place. It shows up when an Executive Director withholds information from the board because they are afraid of being micromanaged — and the board, sensing something is off, starts micromanaging anyway. It shows up in the silence between two people who both care deeply about the mission but have stopped trusting each other.

This is not a personality problem. It is a clarity problem.

The good news is that clarity is achievable. It starts with written role descriptions, not just for the Executive Director, but for the Board Chair and individual board members as well. It continues with a board calendar that makes expectations visible throughout the year, so no one is left wondering what they are supposed to be doing in any given month. And it requires ongoing, honest conversation between the Board Chair and the Executive Director - a critical relationship I will dig into more deeply in a future post.

Is there ever a time when the lines should blur?

Yes. When an organization is in crisis; a sudden leadership departure, a major audit finding, a significant compliance issue. The board may need to become more hands-on temporarily. This is appropriate, as long as everyone agrees it is temporary. The board leans in, stabilizes, and then intentionally leans back out as the organization regains its footing. The key word is intentional. Drift is the enemy.

For my fellow faith travelers, I keep coming back to the body of Christ as a metaphor here. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul writes about different parts of the body, each with its own distinct function, each indispensable, none able to say to another "I don't need you." A hand cannot do the work of an eye. A board cannot do the work of a staff, and staff cannot do the work of a board. Different roles. Same mission. One body.

When everyone knows their role and plays it well, something remarkable happens. The tension lifts. The trust builds. And the mission moves forward in a way that no single person (board member, Executive Director, or otherwise) could have made happen alone.

Who's driving this thing? You both are. Just from different seats.

Erin

PS. If your board and Executive Director are struggling to find clarity on roles and responsibilities, this is some of the most important work you can do together - and it doesn't have to be painful. Reach out and let's talk about what that could look like for your organization. My experience in both the Executive role and in the Chair role brings a unique perspective. 

You Signed Up for This

Many moons ago (over 15 to be exact) as a newly hired Executive Director, I struggled to understand why attendance at board meetings was dismal. Leading a faith-based organization, I assumed "let your yes be yes and your no be no" was an expectation. I mean, these were people of faith. People who cared about the mission. People who said yes when asked to serve. And yet… empty chairs. Unanswered emails. Excuses that trailed off into silence.

I was frustrated. And if I'm being honest, I was a little self-righteous about it too.

What I didn't understand then is that board service carries with it a legal and fiduciary responsibility , a duty that goes far beyond showing up and nodding along. When someone is invited to join a board, the ask often sounds like this: "We'd love to have you. You'd be great. It's just a few meetings a year." What is rarely communicated clearly is what that yes actually means.

So what did they actually sign up for?

The Standards for Excellence Institute, whose resources I have the privilege of both writing and working with as a Licensed Consultant, outlines three core fiduciary duties that every board member carries the moment they say yes:

The Duty of Care means showing up - mentally, not just physically. It means reading the financials before the meeting, asking good questions, and making decisions like a reasonably prudent person would. It means you cannot be a passive passenger on this board. Care is active.

The Duty of Loyalty means that when you walk into that boardroom, you leave your personal interests, your business relationships, and your ego at the door. Every decision you make must be in the best interest of the organization and the community it serves - not you, not your company, not your cousin's catering business.

The Duty of Obedience means remaining faithful to the mission. You were not recruited to redesign the organization in your own image. You were recruited to steward what already exists - to protect its purpose and ensure that every dollar and decision moves toward that mission.

Care. Loyalty. Obedience. Three words that, when I look back at my early days as an Executive Director, I wish someone had handed me on a card to give every new board member at orientation.  Don’t worry, I added those as I learned.

In Matthew 5:37, Jesus says simply, "Let your yes be yes." It is one of the most quietly demanding verses in Scripture. No elaborate vow. No performance. Just the integrity of a person whose word means something. When a board member says yes to service, that yes carries weight; legally, ethically, and spiritually. It is a commitment to show up, to act with loyalty, and to remain faithful to something larger than themselves. Board service, at its best, is a form of keeping your oath.

As I grew professionally as an Executive Director, and what I understand now is this: dismal attendance is rarely about laziness or bad character. More often, it is about confusion. Board members don't show up when they don't know why their presence matters. They disengage when no one has ever clearly told them what is expected or what is at stake.

Is this easy to fix? No. Is it worth fixing? Absolutely.

The first step is clarity. Before someone says yes to board service, they deserve to know - really know - what that yes means. A job description with roles and responsibilities. An orientation. An annual renewed commitment. A conversation about the three duties above. And, as I wrote about in a previous post, a shared set of values the board creates together that makes the culture of service something people want to opt into.

When I think back to my early days as an Executive Director and those empty chairs, I don't feel self-righteous anymore. I feel a little sad for all of us; for the board members who never got the orientation they deserved, and for the new Executive Director (me!) and Board Governance Committee who never thought to give it to them.   By my second year, we had that rectified but still...As the Board Chair for World Relief, I get to participate in a Board Orientation training that I have crafted and revised over the years.  Our board attendance is stellar and our directors understand the role. 

Let your yes be yes. But first, make sure everyone knows what they're saying yes to.

Erin

PS. I have the privilege of serving as a Licensed Consultant for the Standards for Excellence Institute, whose framework on board fiduciary responsibility informs much of my consulting practice. I also wrote their Educational Resource packet on Board Fiduciary Responsibility. If your board could use a tune-up on roles, responsibilities, or culture - I'd love to have that conversation.  Over the last 7 years I have worked with 50+ organizations.  Is yours next?