Do you and your staff members struggle with burnout and with maintaining a healthy work-life balance?

Do you and your staff struggle with managing the pressures of the current political climate?

Does your team struggle with communicating in professional, effective and emotionally healthy ways?

Read on if you want to learn what to about these challenges…

The Solution: Organizational Health Blueprint

The Organizational Health Blueprint is a powerful formula consisting of transformative tools and practices, which I teach through a series of group sessions. These sessions are a combination of workshops and group coaching sessions.. In these sessions I share powerful concepts, tools and practices that organizations and their teams can immediately apply to create greater organizational health and well-being. The Organizational Health Blueprint consists of the following components:

Understanding the impact of limiting conditioned patterns (a.k.a. survival patterns, defense mechanisms, etc.) on organizational health and well-being will allow you to change them. Unless we become aware, understand and transform these patterns, they will continue to drive the behavior of your team members. Becoming aware of how these patterns work will allow your team to initiate deep transformation and healing.

Learning how to manage limiting embodied pattern as individuals and teams allows them to show up from a place of presence, wisdom and clarity instead of fear, scarcity and being reactive. These patterns contain tremendous wisdom and strengths, which have helped us to achieve many thing in our life. However, the key is to learn to express the qualities of these pattern in healthy ways and not from a place of survival.

Applying transformative management and supervision approaches allows managers and supervisors to support the emotional needs of team members while maintaining supportive accountability at the same time. It’s important to understand that once emotional pain is triggered in a supervision setting, it's necessary to de-escalate the resistance and foster calmness so the ability to pursue a productive conversation can be restored.

Creating a shared vision for organizational health and well-being will allow you to create ownership among all team members. They will feel invested and therefore feel inspired to help co-create the conditions to foster greater organizational health and well-being. This will result in a culture that’s rooted in the values of well-being on all levels and help you to maintain a supportive work environment where everyone can thrive.

Identifying measurable indicators for organizational health and well-being will allow your team to monitor their progress so they can identify best practices and continue to make adjustments in areas they want to keep strengthening.  This includes creating a shared understanding of symptoms that indicate a lack of organizational health, but also indicators that show the presence of organizational health so you’ll know how to maintain it.

The Organizational Health Blueprint process can be completely customized to the specific needs and culture of your organization. If this is something you’d like to further explore, please feel free to contact me (the link leads to my contact page). Or you can schedule a free consultation:

In this video I share the number one reason why so many nonprofits/NGOs struggle with creating and maintaining organizational health and well-being, and how the Organizational Health Blueprint can help your organization:

AS FEATURED IN:

My name is Alex Poeter and I’ve been working in nonprofit/NGO organizational development for over thirty years. I’ve worked in many capacities at organizations, including management, founding and co-founding, program development, board development, staff development, and much more.

I’ve also been working as a professional coach with organizations for over ten years. Which means I’m familiar with the common causes and conditioned patterns that prevent organizations from creating the organizational well-being they want. I’ve learned that organizational health and well-being comes from deep inner transformation. This means that we have to become the change we want to see in our organizations and day-to-day work.

I’ve found that it’s not enough to just participate in skill development trainings. Creating sustainable organizational health and well-being comes from the embodiment of a new mindset and new belief systems But also from embodying new behaviors that are rooted in the values of organizational health and well-being. It’s important that organizational teams have a shared language and a shared vision for organizational health and well-being. And shared values and ownership.

Creating greater organizational health and well-being comes from daily practice. This means that organizational health and well-being isn’t something to be attained at a certain point in the future. It’s something that has to be lived from and embodied every day.

Testimonials

  • “Alex is smart, committed, supportive and has decades of leadership experience. When I am working with him on a project, his contributions make that project better. He has helped me grow both personally and professionally. I can’t imagine a better person to help organizations and individuals build on their strengths.”

    – Tara Mack, Executive Director, Education for Liberation Network

  • “Alex Poeter was one of the wisest and most strategic not for profit leaders in Chicago for over twenty years. He was a leader in Chicago’s community organizing community, and he built a strong organization with numerous high quality programs and services for both youth and adults. Alex has a leadership style that is centered on focused listening and clear analysis, and he is skilled at collaborating with diverse groups of individuals and organizations. Alex is rooted in social justice values and empathetic of the many challenges not for profits and their leaders face. He is also a very creative problem solver who anticipates trends and understands how to marry big ideas to clear action plans.”

    – Brian Brady, Executive Director, Mikva Challenge

  • “Working with Alex Poeter has proven to be invaluable to our staff’s ability to move forward in a positive way with mentoring and coaching young people, creating a healthy environment in which our staff and students can thrive, as well as creating an easy to use outcome-based evaluation system and infrastructure for our organization.”

    – Melinda Wiggins, Executive Director, Student Action with Farmworkers

  • “Having worked with Alex for years, I remain steadily impressed with his abilities to perceive and articulate short and long-term needs in a deeply caring manner. If you are looking for a loud superstar, keep looking. If you are looking fora caring and thoroughly competent coach to help you break out of what’s holding you or your organization in harmful patterns, you’ve found him.”

    – Leigh Patel, PhD, Writer, Sociologist, Educator

  • “I have had the pleasure to partner with Alex on inter-generational, social justice work with the Chicago Freedom School for 5 years. Alex is committed to collaborative and participatory community based work with multiple stakeholders. He is an excellent facilitator and organizer – with the ability to garner resources and support multiple voices in consensus building and decision making processes. Institutions, community groups and folks that are seeking a thoughtful, committed and inclusive consultant need look no further.”

    – Keisha Farmer-Smith, PhD, Director of Programs and Quality Assurance, Family Focus Inc.

  • “I've gained so much from my sessions with Alex, particularly from his emphasis on finding a way to lean into my authentic self. This led me to a whole new way of seeing the world and my place in it. By listening and reflecting back what he heard from me, Alex supported me to identify my work values, my unique strengths, and how I can best use them to make an impact and create the experiences I want to have in life doing what I love.”

    – Joanna Welborn, Communications Arts Director, Student Action with Farmworkers

Comments from people and organizations I’ve worked with:

“Alex is a dynamic, thoughtful and values-driven leader. Alex always impressed me with his insightfulness, honesty and dedication to social justice. He is truly collaborative in his approach and excels at building genuine partnerships with individuals, groups and organizations. He is knowledgeable about the dynamics of community and organizational development and skilled at putting that knowledge to work for strategic purposes.”

“In my first ten years at the Wieboldt Foundation Alex started not one but two community organizations. It is most difficult to start one – it takes energy, intelligence, and focus. To start two is exemplary. Alex processes these three qualities and used them to train the local leadership of these diverse organizations, and to enlist and nurture the participation of of a large number of neighborhood residents, organizations and institutions. Alex is uniquely qualified to educate and encourage people in such a way that they feel both supported and more powerful. This demands patience, resilience and a deep understanding of human nature – three other qualities that Alex showed in all of his work in Chicago. I would recommend Alex to anyone who needs someone with any of the qualities mentioned above. I sincerely know that you will not be disappointed.”

“Working with Alex Poeter has proven to be invaluable to our staff’s ability to move forward in a positive way with mentoring and coaching young people, creating a healthy environment in which our staff and students can thrive, as well as creating an easy to use outcome-based evaluation system and infrastructure for our organization.”

“Alex Poeter was one of the wisest and most strategic nonprofit leaders in Chicago for over twenty years. He was a leader in Chicago’s community organizing community, and he built a strong organization with numerous high quality programs and services for both youth and adults. Alex has a leadership style that is centered on focused listening and clear analysis, and he is skilled at collaborating with diverse groups of individuals and organizations. Alex is rooted in social justice values and empathetic of the many challenges nonprofits and their leaders face. He is also a very creative problem solver who anticipates trends and understands how to marry big ideas to clear action plans.”

“Having worked with Alex for years, I remain steadily impressed with his abilities to perceive and articulate short and long-term needs in a deeply caring manner. If you are looking for a loud superstar, keep looking. If you are looking for a caring and thoroughly competent coach to help you break out of what’s holding you or your organization in harmful patterns, you’ve found him.”

“I have found my coaching sessions with Alex Poeter to be impactful. After an hour long session, I go from being overwhelmed to feeling empowered with a clear directive of how to move forward. When I can process an issue I am having with Alex, I find that I can solve my own issues and be a more effective worker and team player.”

“Alex is smart, committed, supportive and has decades of leadership experience. When I am working with him on a project, his contributions make that project better. He has helped me grow both personally and professionally. I can’t imagine a better person to help organizations and individuals build on their strengths.”

You’re probably quite familiar with the common symptoms of lack of organizational health…

While many organizations struggle with maintaining a healthy work culture, the challenges of our current times put a lot of additional strain and pressure on nonprofits and their staff. And whenever there is too much stress on an organization, its staff members often exhibit the following types of symptoms:

  • Feeling guilty about taking time off because constituents might be harmed by receiving less services

  • Not being able to say ‘no’, which leads to over commitment.

  • Burnout

  • Irritability, defensiveness and being reactive

  • Not being able to set healthy boundaries to protect their well-being

  • Unhealthy competitiveness and fear-driven behavior

  • Feeling guilty about setting boundaries out of fear of burdening co-workers

  • Lack of engagement in meetings and organizational activities

  • Not being able to show vulnerability and taking responsibility for unhealthy behaviors

Why nonprofits/NGOs struggle with maintaining organizational health & well-being

While there are clearly many external factors that can impact the health and well-being of an organization, there are a number of internal factors which can be leveraged to create tangible and sustainable change. What’s more is that by influencing and shaping those internal factors, organizations can have much greater stability, adaptability and resilience.

Some of the biggest internal factors that impact the health and well-being of an organization is the emotional state and mindset of its staff members, including leaders and managers. Because organizational environments within nonprofits are often high paced, and impacted by political and economic volatility, leaders and staff members tend to show up from a place of being reactive. This means people show up from a place of survival and scarcity instead of presence, wisdom and abundance.

Once staff members have an understanding of how these embodied survival patterns tend to drive their actions and decisions, and once they’re equipped with tools to transform those patterns, they can start to embody behaviors and practices in their daily work that foster greater organizational health and well-being.

Embodying new behaviors and practices that foster greater organizational health and well-being allows staff members to create visible improvements so they can see tangible evidence that their efforts are paying off.  This helps them to continue to build their confidence and strengthen their belief that they can achieve their ultimate vision for organizational health and well-being.  The stronger their belief grows in their own abilities to create greater organizational health and well-being as a result of their continued progress, the more they’ll feel inspired to keep embodying healthy behaviors and practices as part of their daily work.  This creates a cycle of positive reinforcement so that daily practices to foster greater organizational health and well-being can become an integral part of the organization’s work culture.

Another common factor that can cause internal instability is the embodied survival behavior staff members bring into the work environment that’s stemming from past traumatic work experiences, but also from personal traumatic experiences. Symptoms of these types of embodied survival patterns usually include defensiveness, irritability, fear of speaking up, lack of active engagement, being judgmental, and acting fearfully. And unless these types of patterns are addressed and transformed, they will continue to impact the work environment, organizational culture and team dynamics in negative ways.

This is not to say that workplaces have to be responsible for providing onsite therapeutic support, though providing funds to cover fees for one-on-one coaching and other similar support can be quite valuable. The key is to create a shared language and understanding for how these types of survival patterns play out in work environments so that they will no longer control the behavior of staff members. In that sense, we can’t really change what we’re not aware of.

But once staff members have an understanding of how these patterns tend to drive their actions and decisions, and once they’re equipped with tools to transform those patterns, they can start to embody behaviors and practices in their daily work that foster greater organizational health and well-being.

They can then create a shared understanding of symptoms that indicate a lack of organizational health. But also identify indicators that show the presence of organizational health. This allows them to create supportive conditions to maintain organizational health and well-being.  They can also identify concrete ways to support each other as a team and how to best monitor their continued work to maintain organizational health and well-being.

New possibilities are waiting for you

Imagine the following scenario. Your team keeps showing up as their best selves, which allows your organization to deliver high quality services and impact. People love doing their work. They thrive. Team members support each other. And everyone keeps contributing to maintain a shared healthy work environment and organizational culture. While there are still challenges to respond to, those challenges are no longer seen as a threat. Instead, challenges are seen as opportunities to build your organization’s strengths because everyone knows how to respond to challenges from a place of confidence, vision, wisdom and clarity.

Staff are able to tap into their inner wisdom, which allows them to show up from a place of creativity, resourcefulness and possibility. They have the knowledge and skills to manage and transform any limiting patters that used to prevent them from realizing their full potential as professionals, but also as leaders.

People are engaged, They trust each other. And there is a deep sense of connectedness among staff members.. Everyone knows how to communicate in healthy and effective ways. There is laughter. And there is joy. People are thriving. Your organization is thriving.

I believe that this is absolutely possible for you. I’ve seen it at the organizations I’ve worked with. So, imagine:

Your team has the knowledge and skills to embody healthy behavior in their daily work.

Your team shares a vision for organizational health and well-being, and has shared ownership over that vision.

Your team members trust themselves to respond to challenges from a place of wisdom and clarity.

Your team members know how to manage their insecurities so they can show up from a place of presence and confidence.

Your team members love doing their work and because of that they keep showing up as their best selves.

Additional comments from clients:

"Alex is an amazing listener. He is compassionate. He’s empathic, he’s a strategic thinker. He is everything you would want to have in someone who you’re opening up to about something such as a career choice or a lifestyle change."

"I can’t recommend Alex highly enough. He’s really transformed the way I think about not only my work, but also my life and my relationships and the interconnections between all of these pieces. I highly, highly recommend Alex.”

“I've gained so much from my sessions with Alex, particularly from his emphasis on finding a way to lean into my authentic self. This led me to a whole new way of seeing the world and my place in it. By listening and reflecting back what he heard from me, Alex supported me to identify my work values, my unique strengths, and how I can best use them to make an impact and create the experiences I want to have in life doing what I love.”

"Alex has a gift for coaching and consulting, and combined with his extensive learning and knowledge, he can help anyone move past inner and outer barriers and start the life they intend to live.”

"Alex is an expert listener and skilled coach. He helped me create my career vision and clarify my values. Alex helped me identify my strengths and replace obstacles with new ways of thinking. Working with Alex gave me the courage to develop my own path in order to fill a community need that is not being addressed by anyone else. It was a privilege to talk with Alex on a weekly basis and I consider my time with him to be one of the best investments I have made.”

“I cannot recommend Alex Poeter enough. He is worth his weight in gold!!!! Alex's gift is helping people rewire their brains to think of problems differently.” 

I truly believe that you and your team have tremendous power and potential to create a positive impact.

If this rings true for you, I can help you to harness this power so you can realize your fullest potential. Contact me if you have any questions or if you would like additional information. Or feel free to schedule a free consultation. The Organizational Health Blueprint is for you if:

You’re ready to create the greatest level of heath and well-being for your organization.

You’re ready to create a work environment and culture where everyone can thrive and show up as their best self every day.

You’re ready to create greater organizational resilience, resourcefulness and strength so you can meet any challenge with confidence and optimism.

Don’t wait to create the organizational health, well-being and impact you know is possible.

Truly caring about your success,

Alex