There seems to be a contradiction in the way we approach leadership in organizations.

• On the one hand, there is a strong desire to keep things clear and simple, clear expectations, well defined roles, simple strategies, a limited number of key measurements.

• On the other hand, leaders know that their organizations are complex and the world can be complicated.

Leading an organization entails awareness and management of a myriad of forces, both internal and external. Successful leaders must understand themselves, as well as the people around them. They must understand how external factors such as the economy, demographic change, new technologies, and political developments impact their organizations. They must be able to motivate, challenge, listen, organize, produce, and persist. They need courage, discipline, wisdom, and confidence. They must be able to learn, seek advice, weigh options, and make difficult choices. The list could go on. Indeed it does, in the more than 67,000 books on leadership available through Amazon.

Nonprofit organizations can be more complex than for-profit companies. The nonprofit leader usually has to manage a board of trustees, staff, volunteers, community groups, customers or clients, political, business, and civic leaders, donors, the media, allied organizations, competitors, and others, in a climate of limited resources and high expectations.

A hallmark of successful leadership is the ability to embrace and grapple with complexity. Rather than seeking simplicity, these leaders enjoy complex challenges. They like to stretch their minds and their abilities, finding satisfaction in their own growth, mastering one challenge and moving on to the next.

Seeking Complexity

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes "flow" as the phenomenon scientists and artists experience as they engage in an activity that tests their abilities at a high level, through which they become more proficient, rising to new levels of complexity. In flow the individual is wholly engaged with the challenge, which appears just beyond his grasp, until he figures it out. For artists and scientists a flow activity is often solitary. In the world of organizations, a leader can experience flow when addressing a complex opportunity or problem, processing information, listening to opinions and points of view, playing out "what-if" scenarios, paying attention to gut feelings, and coming to a tough decision.

In taking on increasingly complex challenges a leader develops her skills and abilities. Indeed, one can describe leadership development as a series of steps, through which the individual engages in ever increasing complexity. Those who seek complexity, step by step, become leaders. Those who are satisfied to go only so far up the ladder do not develop as leaders.

In Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and The Making of Meaning (2003), Csikszentmihalyi links the concept of flow to leadership and happiness. Like an artist or scientist, an organizational leader is happy when he takes on a challenge and grows as a result. Like his counterparts, if the challenge is too great he becomes anxious, and when it is too easy he becomes bored. It is the process of always seeking the next level of complexity, and mastering it, that brings fulfillment.

When the level of the challenge and the level of a leader's skill are both high and evenly matched, the leader may obtain flow. That is, the leader becomes totally engaged and happy with the work, feeling focused and in control, with clear goals and immediate feedback. Such moments bring deep satisfaction.

Doing work that is easy, relative to your abilities, may be pleasurable. However, doing work that is both challenging and doable is what really brings happiness.

Find yourself in this diagram, which is adapted from Good Business.

Clearly, where you are depends upon the type of work you are engaged in at the moment. You want to avoid the lower left, and strive to be in the upper right as much as possible.

Five Domains

For a nonprofit leader, success is most often measured by the degree to which her organization attracts funding, attains financial stability, and expands service to its clients and constituents. Her personal success relates to her effectiveness in working with the board, building a strong staff, and maintaining strong relationships with key individuals and constituencies. The emphasis is on success at work. Other dimensions of her life - her own physical and spiritual health, her family and friends - may take a back seat when it comes to defining success.

The pressure and desire to succeed at work can cause someone to lose perspective on the complexity of life. Nonprofit leadership is demanding, in terms of time spent at the office; attending meetings and functions in the evening and on weekends; bringing work home; thinking about work when you are not there; and in particularly stressful times waking up in the middle of the night to worry about the next day.

Successful leaders understand that they cannot succeed at work unless they also are able to grow in other aspects of their lives. It is not sufficient to become ever more proficient as a leader of an organization, if you ignore or fail to meet the challenges of being a parent, a friend, a citizen, and a whole person. Consider these five domains of life:

1. Self—your own development as a human being, taking into consideration physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being and growth.

2. Family—your role as a parent, mate, sibling, and son or daughter.

3. Friends and Neighbors—your relationship with others based on proximity, common interests, or common experiences.

4. Community—your participation in community life, as a citizen or volunteer.

5. Work—your role in leading an organization.

In each of these domains you must seek to grow, meet new challenges, and attain success.

What is Success?

Because leaders seek to grow by engaging in complexity, success for them cannot be the mere attainment of simple goals. For them, success itself is complex. In studying successful business leaders, Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson (Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life 2004) have identified "four irreducible components of enduring success."

1. Happiness—feelings of contentment about oneself.

2. Achievement—attaining goals that meet or exceed expectations or standards.

3. Significance—the sense of having a positive impact on people.

4. Legacy—bringing future benefit to others through one's values and accomplishments.

Leaders understand that lasting success comes only when all four of these components are addressed.

Just Enough

A key finding of the Nash and Stevenson study is that successful leaders do not attempt to grow in all areas at the same time. Rather, they switch from one to another in what the authors call "the reasoned pursuit of just enough." That is, the leaders attend to one area, and when they feel that they're making reasonable progress there, they switch to another. This helps them avoid the trap of spending too much time on work, and ignoring the other domains. In this sense, leadership is about choice and limitations, letting go of some activities and moving to others as needed, to make progress on all fronts.

Navigating the Complexity of Success

With five domains in which to act, and four components of success, leaders have twenty areas to keep in mind as they seek complex challenges and growth. This matrix at the end of this briefing can be used as a navigation chart, to help map a healthy pattern of movement from one area to another.

Make three copies of the matrix.

I. Assessment Use one copy of the matrix to assess your current pattern of growth.

1. Select the cells in which you feel you have achieved enough success over the past year. Think of challenges where you have attained a degree of mastery and made significant progress. In those cells, list some of the things you have achieved.

2. Look at the remaining cells. Which ones do you feel are most important to you at this time in your life? In which areas would you like to make more progress? Highlight those cells.

3. Analyze the pattern. You may want to do this reflecting on your own, or in conversation with a friend or colleague. Where are you making enough progress in your life? Is the success in those areas sufficient for the time being, so that you can turn attention to other important areas; or do you want to keep working in areas where you already have some success? Of the areas you highlighted where you have not made much progress, which ones are most important to you?

II. Goals Use the second copy of the matrix to set goals for the next six months.

1. Select a reasonable number of cells to focus on for the next six months, and set goals for each. These could be a combination of some where you have had little recent progress, and others where you have had some success but feel you need more. Think of activities you can do to make progress in each selected cell.

   These may be completely new activities, or you may modify some current activities so that they extend to more than one cell. For example, you may have spent time in the past year on becoming physically fit, which contributed to your personal happiness and sense of achievement. How might you expand that activity so that it has a positive impact on others? Could you take it even further, so that it becomes a lasting benefit for those you care about?

2. Once you have listed goals and actions for each selected cell, step back and analyze the pattern. Is it sufficient? Will it impel you to spend time on important aspects of your life that need attention? Is it doable? Will you enjoy the challenge? Again, you can do this on your own, or in conversation with a friend.

III. Tracking Use the third copy of the matrix to identify and track action steps.

1. For each of the cells you have selected, identify actions you will take in the next two weeks. Keep this copy handy and track your progress.

Examples—Here are some examples of the kinds of goals or actions one might select for each cell.

Self—Happiness

• Take time to write poetry.
• Exercise regularly.
• Study a topic you enjoy that is not related to your work.

Self—Achievement

• Publish a poem.
• Climb a mountain.
• Master a topic you enjoy that is not related to your work.

Self—Significance

• Organize a poetry reading.
• Organize a mountain climb for disadvantaged children.
• Teach a course on the topic you enjoy.

Self—Legacy

• Start an annual poetry festival in your community.
• Make a significant financial contribution to a mountain climbing club to support outreach to disadvantaged children.
• Publish an article on the topic you enjoy.

Family—Happiness

• Arrange for a massage for you and your mate.
• Cook a meal with your son or daughter.
• Write an appreciative letter to your parents.

Family—Achievement

• Celebrate the time you have spent with your mate, no matter how long.
• Create a website for your family.
• Let your child plan a family vacation.

Family—Significance

• Help your mate do something they have always wanted to do.
• Take a road trip with your son or daughter.
• Organize a family reunion to honor your parents.

Family—Legacy

• Make a contribution to a nonprofit organization in honor of your whole family.
• Write a letter to your grandchildren about yourself and your life, to be opened after your death, and when they reach a certain age.
• Organize a family reunion on what would have been your father's 100th birthday, including a tour of places he lived as a young man.

Friends and Neighbors—Happiness

• Call an old friend, even if it's been a long time since you spoke.
• Go for a walk around the neighborhood, and stop to chat with anyone you see.
• Welcome new neighbors as soon as they move in.

Friends and Neighbors—Achievement

• Have an annual getaway weekend with your closest friends.
• Organize a book club, quilting group, or other group with common interests.
• With others in the neighborhood, organize an annual neighborhood picnic.

Friends and Neighbors—Significance

• Cook a meal for a friend or neighbor who is sick.
• Raise money for a friend in need.

Friends and Neighbors—Legacy

• Make a physical improvement in your neighborhood through advocacy with local government.
• Create a website for a group or club you belong to.

Community—Happiness

• Volunteer for a community organization or event.
• Write a letter to the editor or speak at a community meeting.
• Work for a political candidate.

Community—Achievement

• Become a leader of the board of a local nonprofit organization.
• Become a recognized advocate for a political cause.
• Run for public office.

Community—Significance

• Help your children take the lead in a voluntary, charitable cause.
• Volunteer at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter.
• Raise money to build a playground at your child's school.

Community—Legacy

• Make a planned gift from your estate to a local nonprofit.
• Organize an annual dinner-dialogue on race relations in your community.
• Start a nonprofit organization that addresses the needs of others.

Work—Happiness

• Organize your work and delegate, so that you are able to focus on your unique abilities, doing what you do best and like most.

Work—Achievement

• Set stretch goals for yourself and attain them.

Work—Significance

• Create an organization in which others are able to do their best.

Work—Legacy

• Build an organization that has the right resources and culture so that it will thrive long after you have gone.

	Happiness Feelings of contentment	Achievement Meeting or exceeding expectations	Significance Positive impact on others	Legacy Future benefit to others through values and accomplishments
Self Spiritual Emotional Physical Intellectual
Family Those closest to you.
Friends and Neighbors Those with whom you have much in common.
Community Citizen Volunteer
Work Leadership