Reading for Leading Change-March 2026
We recommend these recent articles as you seek out new inspiration and innovative approaches to nonprofit leadership and social impact.
The Most Purposeful Leaders Don’t Talk About Meaning, They Create It
Staying connected to our purpose is an essential practice for surviving and thriving during challenging times. We appreciate this Forbes article about leading with purpose and creating meaning through our consistent actions as leaders.
One way we can do this is by keeping our mission and purpose at the center of how we work, whether we’re designing team meetings, evaluating results, or making decisions. We can ask ourselves, “How did this work contribute to our mission?” Narratives and storytelling can also help us make sense of our work and impact. Purpose is a daily practice that we as leaders can make visible in our daily work. It is lived through the stories we tell, the decisions we make, what and how we celebrate, as well as how we respond to challenges.
The Key to High-Performing Teams Isn’t More Talent or Perfect Leaders
High‑performing teams succeed not because they are full of superstar talent or led by flawless leaders, but because they create the right conditions for members to work collaboratively, align around shared goals, and make the most of the strengths already in the room. In this Inc. article, Jon Levy shares five key insights from his new book, Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius. He explains that successful teams are built by fostering trust, shared purpose, collaborative systems, and environments where collective strengths are aligned toward a common goal. He advises to “value the people who connect the pieces, create trust, and turn potential into performance.”
Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World
In Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World, Belinda’s Berkeley Haas strategy professor, Toby Stuart, shows how the conferment of status — often through association with prestigious people or institutions — powerfully shapes who gains trust, resources, and opportunity, often more than merit itself. Because people rely on status cues as decision shortcuts, small initial advantages can compound over time into large gaps in visibility, opportunity, and success. As our world becomes more saturated with data, we are relying on these shortcuts even more, unintentionally reinforcing inequality. Stuart argues that leaders can counter these dynamics by naming and examining status effects, sharing status by extending recognition and opportunity to others, and designing systems with clear criteria and structured decision processes that reduce reliance on pedigree or ascribed characteristics.
Toward Meaningful, Valuable, Equitable Governance
This Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) report provides a useful reflection on the role of foundation boards and provides an overview of recommendations for how philanthropic boards and governance practices can be more meaningful, valuable, and equitable. Informed by research on foundations and leaders in the field, the report highlights nine recommended practices for effective governance, including: devote resources to building relationships and trust, attend to how the board does its work as well as what work it does, ensure that the board reflects and engages communities, build accountability within trusting relationships, develop the board’s deep understanding, focus on the best and highest use of the board, be explicit about governance expectations, choose transparency as a default, and move staff away from performing for the board.
What have you read lately that helped you lead your organization? We’d love to hear about it.