By Todd J. Sukol
Ironically, in this week when my wife, Amy Sukol, led a seminar entitled “From Great to Awesome” at the 2017 Chicago Nonprofit Conference*, I was learning a complementary lesson, also loosely based on Jim Collins’ Good to Great, but in the opposite direction.
You see, this week wasn’t what I would call GREAT.
Rather, the power of good carried me, and really our whole office, this week as staff seemed to be in “just back from vacation” mode. Some of us really were just back from vacation. Others were dealing with children returning to school, the stress of upcoming holidays and looming deadlines.
Fortunately, we were well prepared.
Way back when I decided it was time to pursue my lifelong dream to learn to play the drums, I took lessons from the fabulous Wes Crawford. A great teacher, Wes stressed that although “playing by feel” was most satisfying to me, it was important to concentrate on rudimentary drills and thoroughly learn song structures so that even when I was “feeling off,” I could still play my part well. This sobering lesson can mean the difference between good and lousy.
As with playing music, working for a nonprofit organization is best done with a full, inspired heart. Our sector, not unlike the bandstand, is no place for just going through the motions. Passion, inspiration, commitment – these intangibles matter! They spell the difference between good and great.
But sometimes great is not an option. So many of us in the sector vacillate wildly between highly charged moments of intense productivity and low output slumps. I have certainly experienced this in my career – in my life. If we’re honest, many of us have. The inspired highs are amazing. We wouldn’t be who we are without them. But no human being can stay hyper charged all the time. We need ways of keeping forward momentum even when passions fade temporarily.
We’re in this business because we want to make positive change. Achieving lofty visions and fulfilling organizational missions requires greatness, to be sure, but sometimes greatness requires moments of simple goodness. As my long-time friend Rich once teasingly told me when I go through a bout with perfectionism in grad school, “anything worth doing is worth doing shabbily.”
Because our staff team diligently builds work plans based on office-wide goals that everyone has a hand in developing, a distracted week doesn’t need to turn into an unproductive one. We all know how to play our parts. We keep things progressing, even during those off moments when it feels a little more like just going through the motions than we’d prefer. Great can temporarily slow to good rather than crashing into lousy. The inspiration will return soon, as it always does. And when it kicks back in, we’ll still be heading down the right road and in the right direction.
*Amy Sukol, CFRE, is Executive Vice President at Lautman Maska Neill & Company in Washington, DC. She presented “From Great to Awesome: Using Analytics, Testing, and Donor-centricity” at DMA Nonprofit Federation’s 2017 Chicago Nonprofit Conference.