The pitfall I have experienced on multiple occasions in the workplace is : Don’t Create an Environment of Fervent Execution. As you all probably know by now I work in the nonprofit sector and nonprofits are repeat offenders of coming up with grand plans or ideas for marketing and business development however they don’t invest in salaries (or if they do – they have a small budgets) to have staff with these expertise to implement these ideas. In addition existing upper management in nonprofits are weak in marketing and business development and do not make it a priority. In my opinion many of these executives are not truly qualified/talented for the roles they have and it shows …holding their organizations back from being competitive, innovative, profitable and more.

I learned that in order to be successful in this area organizations need to demand accountability to implement action steps and reach/exceed goals,  give feedback, tools, resources and set CLEAR  and consistent expectations (that don’t change every other day). I also learned that nonprofits need to hire the right person for the job, as noted above and when the right people are hired incentivize them- in many ways however “pay to play.” Just like businesses nonprofits need to pay good people to have the talent and professionalism.

This is why I am doing this masters program. I aspire to be a top executive in nonprofit one day and can say in absolute confidence I will not be victim of this pitfall as I will lead much differently than the disasters I have seen over the past 15 years in this area.

Greetings, I am excited to be part of this class, which is my third class in the OD and Change program. In previous classes I have learned a lot about my strengths which some are focus, discipline and analytical. I think in this class my previous work will help me to learn how to market myself as an OD Professional especially since I work in role that as my employer sees it, has nothing to do with OD. I am a fundraiser (sales) professional in the nonprofit sector and have done this for 15 years. I see my role as very connected to OD as I am managing relationships, accounts, volunteers, staff and more. I am responsible to create a system and environment and train these stakeholders so they are ultimately successful in generating more revenue for nonprofits to further research, education and advocacy.

The biggest challenge I have as marketing myself as an OD Consultant is that my industry (nonprofit) doesn’t value or in most cases acknowledge the value of OD to the success of their organizations and directly correlating to the bottom line being more lucrative as a result of OD. I have recently joined the Board of the Chesapeake Bay Organization Development Network Board (Washington DC area) as the Communications/Marketing Director on the Board. This is timely for this class I guess. I enjoy marketing and have done a lot of this in my career as this is another area where nonprofits “skip” in the priority list. As a fundraiser, I have done almost all of the marketing and PR in most of my professional positions in addition to meeting or exceeding revenue goals.