Review: 'Resilience That Works'

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: A longtime nonprofit manager who’s spent her entire career steeped in the inner workings of the sector becomes the head of an organization. She works tirelessly, rarely takes a vacation, successfully steers it through a difficult financial period, seemingly by force of will, and no one ever doubts that she has the organization’s best interests in mind. But within five years, she steps down and never leads another organization.

Was she not the right fit for that particular organization? Was it burnout?

I suspect that if she’d had a chance to read Resilience That Works: Eight Practices for Leadership and Life, by Marian N. Ruderman, Cathleen Clerkin, and Katya C. Fernandez, such a leader might have had a better experience and a more enduring tenure.

Written as the coronavirus began to spread around the world and published by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), where the authors were working at the time (Clerkin is now senior director of insights at Candid, and Fernandez is at Stanford University), the book aims to help nonprofit leaders examine their work and their approaches to work and guide them to be better able to sustain their energies....

Read the full book review by Matt Sinclair, editor of Philanthropy News Digest.