Are Non-Linear Careers The New Linear? (EP.94)

Speaker A: Hey, this is Tim. Before we start, if changes in your company hold for a while and then quietly revert, that's a solvable problem. I built a free seven minute diagnostic called the Friction Finder. It identifies the constraint getting in your way, your best first move, and where your team is most likely to snap back. You'll also get the Friction Tax Calculator, the dollar amount these symptoms are already costing you. Find it@the frictionfinder.com and a quick favor before we dive into the episode. If this conversation sparks something for you, share it. Text a link to a friend, drop it in Slack, or post it on your socials. The more of us sharing what works, what doesn't, and how to reimagine work itself, the better our workplaces can be. Now onto the show. Welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast exploring what happens when we center people, purpose and possibility at work. I'm your host, Tim Cenova. Today I'm joined by Emile Kang. This episode connects to our Inside the Search series on executive hiring, but the conversation ranges a lot wider than the search itself. Emile's career has offered him myriad vantage points on the sector, what makes it tick, and what often gets in the way. From leading one of the largest Orchestras in the U.S. a job he started at age 31, to directing arts grant making at, uh, one of the largest arts funders in the country, where he helped imagine a $125 million creatives rebuild new York initiative during the heart of the pandemic. He's now consulting, teaching and writing an increasingly popular subset called the Reprise, where he publishes clear eyed thinking on hiring, leadership development, career paths, and the institutional conditions that often make or break leaders once they're in the room. His pieces have a way of making you stop and go, huh, uh, that is weird. Why do so many organizations do it that way? In this conversation, we get into why nonlinear careers might be the new linear why the positional part of a job search is only a small portion of the actual work, what search committees often get wrong when they assemble a magical profile of their next leader instead of first getting clear on, um, what the institution wants to become and why governance might be the most unregulated corner of the nonprofit sector. I've known Emil for years, but we'd never actually met until I sent him a note after it seemed like everyone in my LinkedIn feed was sharing his writing, so I'm especially excited to connect with him here. Emil, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker B: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Speaker A: So to get us Going how do you typically introduce yourself in the work you do these days?

Speaker B: Funny thing is, is that trying to answer that question is what led me to write one of my essays on Substack, which is about who are you without the title. What is interesting to me is that it's naturally more difficult when you don't have an institutional affiliation to be able to introduce yourself. And I think we've just been programmed this way to sort of define ourselves by our institutional titles. But I can say now, after m. Months of practice, before it was a series of ums, um, ahs, uh, but now it's really simply, I'm an arts consultant, writer and educator based in New York City.

Speaker A: What did a young Emile want to be when they grew up? And when you look back now, does that thread still show up in what you're doing or. Or not?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, this is kind of like a therapy appointment almost. I was never given the opportunity to answer that question. Or maybe I was never asked the question beyond it being sort of answers like, I want to be an astronaut, but not really. I was groomed from a very young age by my parents to become a doctor, because in traditional Asian cliche form, my parents came to this country and the whole idea was for me to be a doctor. And then I also played the violin, and I became okay at it. But that was never something that I had ever pursued on my own. I say all this because I struggled in most of my young adulthood, teenagehood to determine what my voice was or what I believed in and the things that I cared about. And it really wasn't until one particular class in undergrad, a class on post surrealism, funny enough, where a professor for the first time really helped me shape my own voice, that I had something to offer and something to say. So I answered your question that way because I really think about people's career aspirations less in terms of jobs and more in terms of how do you find your voice and, uh, how do you think about what you care about in the world? And I'm lucky in that that's how I came to think about my career path. Now, if that had occurred in a different setting, it might have worked out differently. But that's what led me to end up working in the arts was from a single art history class.

Speaker A: You've written about nonlinear careers, and you even in your intro mentioned about how people define themselves by their title or the challenge of not defining yourself by the title. And I'm wondering, given the last several years we've been Living in where it seems like all bets are off on careers and things are going sideways in different ways. That if nonlinear that you wrote about actually is becoming the new linear, where people are not going from one role until increasing the path into becoming a CEO or becoming a uh, chief Development officer or whatever it might be.

Speaker B: I really do think that this notion of a linear career is archaic, almost anachronistic now. But I think that it is basically a trail of breadcrumbs that people can leave behind so that their loved ones, future employers, can follow. It's really more about creating a sense of logic around one's path as opposed to truly satisfying one's curiosity and pursuing learning as the primary motivation for one's career. A lot of it is also just based on the practicalities of life. You know, if you have families, people to support, you have a lot of influences. People want to understand what you're doing because they worry about you. And so you, you try to leave that trail of breadcrumbs for them. And when you don't, all of a sudden that's when they start questioning you. It's really easy to say that it all makes sense in hindsight, but that doesn't necessarily help a spouse or parent or child to forget what that means or even a uh, potential employer, because those sort of pivots also confuse employers. I think at the end of the day we have to do a better job. We, those who follow a nonlinear path, have to do a better job of articulating the merits of the pivot. We have to do a better job of articulating the value of cross sector knowledge. We have to do a better job of articulating how we are being driven by our own curiosity and desire to understand and learn. I think that the world will catch up. A, uh, non linear path really, as you're saying, perhaps is the linear path at the moment. But I think it's more about not only being true to oneself than actually taking some time to be able to articulate the rationale, the thinking that one has given to the work to think about. Why did I move from X to Y and what did I think I was going to achieve in that? Or how did my current role generate a list of questions that maybe my current role can't answer and how maybe I want to think about another job and another path as a way to answer those questions. And that's certainly how I pursued it.

Speaker A: The hiring market is brutal right now, especially for people who are like, I could do that thing, but I don't have the title like the 200 other people who have that. So I don't get into the funnel. And so having just completed a program working with some graduate students, many are concerned about where they're going to get a job. You became the head of a major Symphony Orchestra at 31. I'm assuming you didn't know a lot about what you didn't know in taking that. What advice do you give to people who are earlier in their career that might have been informed by you earlier in your career, taking a job that you just had to learn as you went?

Speaker B: The positional search is 10% of one's job search, or should be 10%. It's a really critical one for sure, but it's only the beginning. It's the scratching of the surface, and it is the door that gets opened. But in one of the pieces that I wrote about the other job search, no one tells you about, really about this relational journey that people are on. Certainly, certainly I didn't fully understand this until much later. So I'm not suggesting that people need to know this when they're 25 or even 35. If there's anything I want younger folks to understand is that it's like, you know, saving for retirement. You got to start it even with it makes no sense when it looks like it's like $10 here, $5 there. Just got to start it from the beginning. And it will make sense over time, and it will compound over time. In the case of this analogy, it's like all these random people you seem to meet actually tend to actually know each other, and then over time, they will start talking to each other. That's the compounding equivalent in my mind. What happens there is that your network becomes a real championing community of people who understand you, who get you, who actually can speak for the values that you bring and the work that you have. But you can't create those relationships when you need them like that. They have to actually be developed organically, humanistically, with patience and with compassion and with generosity. And so what that means you're not thinking about it transactionally at all. You're thinking about it purely relationally and dynamically. In a way, the search that I talk about always is this idea of how do you think about the people who inspire you, the people who you would hope to you one day could be your mentors, even if they never end up being them. You start to identify traits and approaches and characteristics that you admire, and you start to be able to be precise in articulating what about people that you're, uh, witnessing in the world inspires you, but they're not just. They're cool or they're exciting or whatever. You know, obviously adequate words are to something more precise around. I, uh, really admire how they center compassion in all of their work. That is amazing to me that they can do that and still be an effective leader. I really want to learn how to do that. That's a very different kind of level of learning. As young leaders, I really encourage all of them to identify these traits because these are then also ways that they can start to understand that how they want to grow as leaders themselves, and then they start to do that. So you're not only identifying the traits in people you admire, you're actually starting to understand the traits you're looking to accumulate yourself. And that, of course, helps when you start to get into conversations with individuals and cocktail parties and meetings and on the street corner. You're able to actually get into a deep conversation fairly quickly because you've been giving this a lot of thought. And I promise you that leaders like hearing those things because these are reflective of insight and thoughtfulness that I think when we have an opportunity, we want to be able to be in dialogue with. On the flip side, as an employer, we're also looking to have those kinds of conversations with potential employees. We're not looking for people who know how to use Excel or social media or things. We're really looking to have people who are thoughtful, considerate, compassionate, insightful, who can introduce new ideas, who, you know, understand working in the collective, how different, what's working individually. All these things are in there. And you want to see an individual's mind traversing all these spaces all the time. And, and that is a harder thing to get from a resume. I think that you're looking at people who work in nonlinear forms that you can actually get some of that a bit more than those who just work up a ladder in a linear fashion.

Speaker A: I think the positional part ten years ago was much easier. The job market was just different and relational. I would, plus one, start sooner rather than later. I look at my LinkedIn connections as a scrapbook of my career. I can scroll all the way back to the beginning, be like, that's that job, or that's that conference, or that's that group. And you can see how these connections, you carry them with you. And so I'm excited that people earlier in the career, they have a tool like this where those of us, this didn't exist until later in Our careers. It is this moment to see, like, here's these connections, and these people know that, and that's what led to this thing. And, and how do you care for those as human beings and stay connected?

Speaker B: You just don't know the networks you've built over time and how they actually come back to connect with you again, even when you're the least expecting them. And these things just connect all the way along. And the relationships, you just. You don't do them because they help you. You do them because these relationships are meaningful to you and that you want to. And I just think that these are, uh, amazing how over a course of a career, you actually do stay in touch with people. Even if there are gaps of years in between. There are reasons why you make these relationships. And there are things that people start to understand what your values are. I think that's the part of working where it's really important that you see a job in more than a job description, but in a way to enact one's values. And it's those values people remember when you leave the job.

Speaker A: We'll be right back. But first, a quick note for anyone feeling a little lost in your career. We launched Career Camp a few months ago, and we've been really heartened by what participants are sharing already. Not just the email that said career Camp is so hot. The content is on fire, though, that that one did make our day. But what we hear most is that people wish they'd found it sooner because it's grounding, it's practical, it's human. They tell us it helped them finally make sense of their experience, see their strengths more clearly, connect the dots between where they are and where they want to be and make moves they've been putting off. Some even landed their next job already. Career Camp is self paced with encouraging nudges along the way. And right now it's $99 with the option to add coaching with a real live human. Plus, the new Trail Pathfinder helps you start exactly where you are, not where you think you should be. If you're ready for more clarity in your career, visit WorkShouldNSuck Co CareerCamp. Now back to the show. You put your finger on something that, in a different context, has always puzzled me in that arts organizations are filled with some, um, incredibly creative people who themselves are aware artists who seemingly check that creativity at the door when they go into an organization and run it like any other organization would from, you know, 1985 or something. I think that some of your writing that's really resonated with people is that you're speaking from what the board and what organizations need to do to better adapt for this not being 1985. And so I think you're prompting organizations and boards and leadership to reconsider what they think of when they're trying to find people for roles or how they support people. And so I wonder how that frame of people checking their creativity at the door and just running it like it was any other organization and any other sector, if that resonates with you at all.

Speaker B: I certainly can speak from personal experience in this notion of checking one's creativity at the door. The complicated part is not the organizational issue or the creativity issue. It's the question around how do we reconcile leadership with creativity to understand that there have been very, uh, historically, of course, many, many things about leadership that are born from the corporate sector and not necessarily from the arts and creative sector. And so we are bombarded with lessons of leadership that come from this commercial, for profit, corporate structure. And then we are taught by boards and the world that these are the ways that one needs to behave as a leader. And of course no leader will tell you that they're not creative, they are. But yet we don't have a way to try to leverage the creative talents that we have in the name of leadership, because it doesn't necessarily exist in that way in the for profit world. But I do think in many cases now, and this might not be true anywhere except in my own head, but I feel like leading with a human centered approach, leading from compassion, leading with kindness. These are things that are universal and I think can actually be there. I do think also leading without judgment is also important. But I also think leading without fear and actually leading proactively and not reactively are really critical things that, ah, any artist understands, because an artist is actually doing these things all the time with a level of intentionality, conviction. It doesn't mean they're always right, but I think there are things that we can learn from artistic practice as leaders that have to be put into place in these roles. I think, uh, for boards it's really hard because risk is something to mitigate and not something to celebrate. That's a real problem in our world because in the nonprofit sector, we should be embracing risk as something to leverage and not to only to mitigate. It's like any kind of institution that's being run by lawyers. Then risk becomes, um, a bad word. And we really need to think about just like debt, there's good debt and bad debt. There's good risk and bad risk. And how do we actually understand the difference between the two? And I think artists are the ones who are best equipped to address that.

Speaker A: Risk isn't binary. Right? It's a combination of risks. And I'm also struck by this leading without fear and risk, and how the incentives aren't there for executives to do new things, be risky. Because, I mean, if you risk and it goes well, you get to keep your job and your same salary. If you risk and goes poorly, you probably lose your job. And so the incentives that structure the organization aren't even there. And so what do you make of that?

Speaker B: I think now you're speaking to, um, the limitations of the nonprofit model. I have written about the real perils of the nonprofit model and how it was built for a different age, a different time, that was built for this gilded age period of American history and how we have lumped the arts into a space that was never meant for the arts and culture. And that economic model is one of scarcity, of under capitalization, of risk averseness. All those things are baked into this model. It's also based on a model of power dynamic. The wealthy, few and powerful overseeing charitable, uh, cause without understanding that the charitable cause is actually what creates a workforce. And that workforce actually needs to be able to live with some kind of stability and predictability. Trying to address stability and predictability in a model that's built around under capitalization and scarcity is really difficult. And then you, as the leader, are the one traversing these divides all the time. It just doesn't work in my mind. I've been trying to figure out ways, how do we address whether, uh, it was as a funder or one leading organization to try to improve that reality. But, you know, at the end of the day, when I was at the Mellon Foundation, I looked at how do we build alternative economic models that can think about building the systems that we actually need versus the container that we've lived with for so long?

Speaker A: Well, and I'm curious. From the outside, it would seem to many people that your role at the Mellon foundation, you sat in one of the most powerful seats in the arts and culture sector in the country. I also know the Mellon foundation is made up of human beings. You know, whenever you get human beings together, it's not always what it seems. There are challenges, there are curveballs, there are speed bumps that, that maybe m get in the way of the best laid plans and best laid intentions. And so what do you wish people understood about what was possible from that seat that you were in and what wasn't, and when you look back at it, what are you most proud of accomplishing from your time there?

Speaker B: We live in a country, in a society where philanthropy has been baked into the economic structure of our work. There may be many days when I wished we could rewind the clock back to the turn of the 19th, 20th century, uh, reimagined this whole thing, but that is neither here nor there. So we live in this situation where philanthropy, both private foundations, family foundations, individual donors are needed. I would say when I first went to the foundation, for me, the most important part of that pivot was a chance to be able to have a bird's eye view of this sector that I had never had a chance to see, to be able to see where interesting work was occurring, where we could somehow draw some parallels and create some convergences and some synergies across communities and sectors and disciplines. What we, of course, end up seeing more is all of the challenges, scarcities, dysfunctions that exist in the field, whether it be in terms of lack of resources or a, uh, lack of effective governance practices or even sectors themselves who are perpetuating challenges that they are trying to fix. In terms of your question of what I wish people understood about philanthropy, it is not a silver bullet, number one, and that we are, in a sense, in many cases, in the business of applying very fancy band aids to challenges that, you know, I think of them as trying to address the symptoms, not the illness. The patient will never get better, but they will continue living, you know, which is worse. Right. We still want them to live. So, you know, it's not actually providing the cure that the patient needs to live a healthy life that doesn't require this kind of treatment all the time. It is a, uh, an ecosystem problem where we haven't naturally addressed the larger causes of the challenges that we see nonprofits face all the time. And, of course, what we also see as private philanthropy, we can't possibly address all the needs all the time at once. So there are always critics of philanthropy that say, well, they're not doing this or they're not doing that. You know, I think from my perspective, I did approach it with a certain view. Not everyone agrees, and it's fine. But I believe that we had mistaken or conflated the art sector for art institutions. I really believe that. And I wrote an essay on this. What is the arts? What does it mean? What are we calling the arts? And that in many cases, we all define the arts differently. We are looking to try to come up with a singular answer to a, uh, complex ecosystem. In the cases of philanthropy and the arts sector, we basically look at dissecting institutional structures and the different layers of institutions without understanding that the arts also includes the artists themselves. I think we need to do a better job to rethink what the art sector might look like from the perspective of the individual artist as opposed to the art product or about the art institution. I approached it with a very specific thesis which was about can we imagine an artist centered society? And what would an art sector look like that is actually built on an artist centered society? And I thought that would have been an, uh, interesting approach. But of course, in many cases a lot of institutions bristled at this idea, would say that, well, if you don't have institutions, the artists won't survive. And that would be the response that they would give. So that was the primary challenge that I faced as a funder trying to defend this idea that maybe what we should focus on is actually looking at how artists are making a living in this world and the lack of social safety nets that artists face and how we need to think about the arts sector in trying to address that as opposed to the under capitalization of arts institutions small and large, which of course has been the dominant narrative of, uh, our sector for the last 50 years. If I can just come back to the last part of your question, which was one thing that was most proud of while I was there, I would say it's Creatives Rebuild New York, which was the major pandemic related relief initiative that I helped imagine. It was $125 million workforce development initiative that was half a guaranteed income initiative for artists in New York State and half an artist employment initiative to help try to address all these issues that I was just mentioning. I was putting my money where my. It was not my money, it was the foundation's money. You know where I what I was talking about, which is trying to address the plight of individual artists in our world today. It hasn't resolved issues. And I still think that we need to do a better job of trying to help gig economy artists to try to transfer 1099 work into W2 work so they have access to health insurance and things like this. Obviously the world has a lot of challenges and that is the thing that I'm most proud of.

Speaker A: I want to flip this over to the hiring side, to the organization side. I often think most boards, unless they're really bad at hiring, they might not have hired a CEO in the same configuration. Board members Change, you know, it might have been quite a while. So you're trying to come together in this weird construct to find a person. You're leveraging hiring the way hiring supposed to be done, which isn't necessarily great, uh, when you're trying to center care humanity. What's your advice for organizations that might not even know they're bad at hiring, but should be more intentional about structuring processes?

Speaker B: Hiring on different levels of hierarchy are different. So I don't want to suggest that they're all the same. But if we talk about the executive search, I think too often search committees, even search firms, rely upon some kind of magical profile of a person that they want. That's the beginning. Second part of that, which doesn't make it any better, is that usually is an amalgamation of the qualities they didn't have before. It's the reaction to. I think the best way for searches to get launched is for the institution to know exactly what the institution wants to be, regardless of the leader. What does the institution want to become? And then how can a leader help them achieve those goals? Or what kind of leader do they need to achieve those goals? That rarely happens. Shockingly. It's usually in, um, some magical alchemy of qualities of a person who, you know, they want a visionary and they want someone who's good at balancing budgets and they want someone who's good at managing staff. And they want, they want, they want. Oh, and they want a, uh, leader who can listen to the board or engage them, um, which is a quote for pick their ideas. All of these random things have nothing to do with the institution is trying to become. It's a revolving door of those realities that still doesn't address the bigger issue, which is most institutions are not willing to explain what they want to become. And to be fair, sometimes institutions don't know yet. They have boards who perhaps are not strong boards. And so they're just not in a place to be able to generate that level of clarity at any point. But then I would say then the search should be to hire someone who can help them get there. That would be then a good search. And then how do you find a leader who can help them gain clarity in what their ambition should be, not in getting there, but not articulating them them, which is a different kind of leader than actually getting to that place. So searches have to start from the institutional perspective, as opposed to a place of fear, anxiety or arbitrary aspiration. These are not places that they should be, and certainly they should not be coming from A place of wanting to hire a super person, superhuman, that can do all the things, because that's also absurd. If you do any one of those things, I think you're better off than most places. So that would be a good place to start. Then candidates come in and say, I don't want to admit that I'm maybe a, uh, stronger visionary, maybe less interested in, you know, managing staff. And so if I have to say that I want a coo, then it looks like I'm admitting some kind of weakness. I can't do that. Well, then everyone is starting off the place of not telling full truths. You're having to put on a performance of a version of a leader that we know is not realistic. And, uh, the board knows it's not realistic. And yet you're still not saying the things that could actually help you.

Speaker A: Well, and so challenging. One of my colleagues refers to hiring as an unregulated process. And interviews mean more improv than any structure. You're kind of just know roughly what you have to do, but you're improving. And you don't know if saying that thing about the CEO is going to help you or hurt you. It's like the multiverse, because in one scenario it would help you, in another scenario it wouldn't. And you're trying to pick up on clues while you're, you're going. And so it just becomes exponentially more challenging to note.

Speaker B: The performativeness of searches on both sides is the problem. But I think that really still does start from the institutional standpoint. They have to know exactly what they're trying to become and then articulate what kind of leader will help them get there. In their minds, it still might be not the right definition what kind of leader, but at least it's some attempt at articulating, we need a leader like X because we want a leader to get us here. And then as a candidate, you can understand where the institution looks to go and the kind of leader they've identified to get them there. Those pieces being set are more than what we get often in these searches,

Speaker A: and that's a rarity that organizations take that time. You've seen a lot of them. Um, what do you think would change that dynamic to say up front in any role, we need to know what this person is going to come into, what we need them to do now and into the future, not what the last person we hoped to do or what the last person did.

Speaker B: It's really hard to answer the question simply because one would think, well, maybe couldn't search firms help in this process? The search firm is still beholden to their client. And so if their client tells them one thing, they could only save so much without becoming that unruly search firm. They don't want to do that. It's a uh, challenge to be able to say to the institution. There's a lot of pre work that needs to go into a search before you do it. And coming up with a list of traits of a person is not a search. Identifying where the institution needs to go is really critical. If search firms sort of in a sense demanded all collectively this pre work, maybe that could be something. But I'm not kidding myself. You know, I'm on a bunch of boards. And this is the thing that I talk about is before we think about the kind of leader we need to hire, we have to be able to articulate the kind of organization we want to be in the next three to five years. And then we need to figure out from there the kind of leader that will get us there. And even when organizations think they know that, they say, well, we have a strategic plan. Most of those are not plans, they're delusions. You're not really stating the things that you really are trying to become. You're stating outcomes, not goals. There's so many moving parts to this. I think that best thing one can do is to address one of them, not trying to address all of them.

Speaker A: We were sharing a case study of hiring a senior executive and I said, you know, rough math on this was the rules comping 200,000 you had infringe, it's about a quarter of a million. Then this rules three to five years into your organization. So let's just say four for easy math. It's a million dollar proposition. Like you're making a million dollar decision. Are you giving the same effort that you would to any other million dollar decision? And I had a colleague yesterday say that's only half the story. Because that same million dollar person can be horrible and burn the place down or be exponentially great, depending on who you choose can do a lot of harm or good for your organization. And I feel that resonates with some groups where they go, oh my gosh, we probably should spend a little more time on this one because that's a big investment we're making and it concretizes it in a way that's not, oh, it's a CEO, uh, who's going to lead this organization.

Speaker B: What you're getting at for me is really a thing that I've written the most about in my substack, which is about governance practices and how governance is also unregulated, good governance. And I really think we need to do a better job in the nonprofit sector to systemize governance. And I don't just simply mean the makeup of board members so that they're more diverse, equitable, all these other things that we do that are important. We need to do a better job of creating standards of strong governance practices and that, uh, somehow organizations are indexed collectively on strong governance. Just like board members like to evaluate their leaders, we need to do a better job of evaluating boards. I think there just needs to be some accountability there. There's very little accountability. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we're still living in, again, this gilded age model of boards, which, of course, is who holds the power, the people who have the money. Who holds the money, the people who are on the board. And so who can say anything to them? Nobody. You end up with unregulated, ungoverned governing structure where there isn't a level of accountability in terms of those practices. We have to rely upon the alchemy of, oh, we have the best chairman ever, but then we want to try to replicate that person, the next one, and we never get that person right. Or we let that really toxic, poor performing board members stay on the board because they give us 50,000 a year. And it's like it's a deal with the devil we've made in order to get that. But we don't understand the damage that that toxic board member has done over years. So it's like all these things won't change because of the way this nonprofit system is structured. So, yes, I think we should be paying board members, for example. And I think then there's a level of expectation that you have to perform at a certain level. If you're not meeting that, you leave. I have a fantasy. Not a fantasy, because I have a draft of it, of creating a, uh, governance index tool, a good governance index tool. I've written essays that have hinted at this. It's actually a tool that you fill out. It spits out for you a score of how well your board is doing now. It is not ready for primetime, but is meant to be a provocation then, to be something usable, because it really does need a level of quantifiable, uh, mathematical algorithmic structure to it that's going to be real and defensible. When I have the courage, Wendy, I'm going to post this it's not to suggest that my set of standards is the right one. It's to say that we need one. We have to also understand that it isn't monolithic. So strong governance practices for a rural, small organization of $300,000 is going to be very different than strong governance practices of a hundred million dollar organ, a major urban center. We have to be able to modulate and calibrate for different geographies, different communities, different structures and all these kind of ways. So that dimension is completely missing from what I'm doing. But I think we desperately need this so that leaders CEOs can feel more empowered to be able to name things. Because right now, as we know, lots of CEOs, executive directors have trouble even when they see things, or even board leaders in naming challenges that they find in their own boards. It is the single most often cited question to me that I get from potential clients, like how do I fix a, uh, poor performing board? Or how do I build a board that doesn't undermine the work that we've been doing so far? Or how do I keep a high performing board? I mean, all these kinds of questions that I think that no one person can really have an answer to.

Speaker A: Well, and take that to the staff and your team. How do you keep a great team? How do you keep high performing team? How do you jettison people who are toxic? All these questions at various levels and no surprise, I knew our time was going to fly by. And I've got a thousand other questions that I would like to explore with you. But our time is limited. So as we're bringing the plane in for a landing on this one, where do you want to land it?

Speaker B: I think it really has to be in, um, encouraging everyone in the field to be able to say the truths that they're holding to find the proper and appropriate avenues for telling their truths. They can't always necessarily be laid out in all different forums. We know this. And in fact I'm the first one to admit the reason why I'm able to say the things I'm saying now are because I don't have an institutional hierarchy around me and so I can feel free to speak truthfully and uh, you know, you can hold me accountable and say, well, you didn't do that when you were X and you were Y. And it's true, I didn't. I'm also saying, I'm not suggesting that I knew how to do that either, but there is a real reality around. I'm not the first person to have left institutional structures and still didn't name truth. So at least that is a positive, um, that I have done. So I'm. I also hold that true too. I do think though, if we can encourage all people to be able to name them, because I think when we don't name them, for whatever reason, good as they may be, we don't remember them. There's like a, um, practice of naming truths, like exercising a muscle that you need to keep doing. And I think for me, this is what I'm trying to do now, and I would encourage everyone, whether it was distributed or not, or it's published or not, or it's even shared or not, is to be able to document your observations. The things that you're seeing, the things you're noticing, the things you wish would be different. Our field would be better for it because otherwise we will become too busy with the next thing and we're always, of course, too busy with the next thing and what we know. Then the truths then go by the wayside and 10 years go by and we find ourselves in a similar situation.

Speaker A: Emil, it's such a joy to spend this hour with you. I really appreciate you being so open about your insights and your fantastic substack. I'll share links in the episode notes so people can find that. Many thanks for your time, your insights, and thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Speaker B: Thank you Tim. And just let me thank you for doing this work. This is work that's really important and I'm really grateful to you for giving folks like me and others a voice.

Speaker A: If this episode sparks something for you, a great way to support the show is to share it with a friend or colleague who'd find it useful too. Text them the link, drop it in Slack, share it on your socials, or bring it up in conversation. Want to go further? Invite a guest from the podcast to join a book club style conversation with you and your team. The more of us sharing what works, what doesn't, and how to reimagine work itself, the better our workplaces can be. And of course, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's next. Until then, thanks for listening.