Trust: use it or lose it.

Nonprofit CEOs are always thinking about money—how to raise it, how to steward it, how to save it, how to raise it. (Yes, many seem to think twice as much about how to raise it as the other dynamics.)

But money isn’t the most important currency in your nonprofit. 

That’s what I heard from Josh Kwan, CEO of The Gathering, in this week’s episode of The Nonprofit CEO Podcast. He said:

"The relationship I have with my community is based on trust. That's the most important, most vital, essentially the only currency that matters in my world. I think about trying to accumulate and build and secure and sustain trust. And I also have to think about how I might be willing to use and expend some of that trust."

I was struck by the need to use and expend trust. That seems both problematic and common.

This reminded me of my conversation with Phil Buchanan of The Center for Effective Philanthropy, way back in Episode 1: 

"We have to stand up for our values. And the risk of what you lose if you don't isn't just that we just seed ground needlessly. But it's also that you lose the trust of the people who thought they knew what you stood for…They have to be able to trust that you mean what you say, and the only way they're going to trust that is if you're willing to say it when it's hard to say, or you're willing to do the thing that's hard to do."

It’s a weird paradox. Hoarding trust can mean losing it. Spending trust shows people who you really are, that you have courage, and that—surprisingly—builds trust, even if people may disagree with some of what you may do. Another reason this is on my mind this week is that as I’ve been writing this piece, Phil just published an article on related themes. As a newer CEO, he told his board, 

"I don't really know what I am doing." 

That’s exactly the move I commended to you in last week’s article: stop dancing. (Read Phil’s full piece here, including some interesting board dynamics and why it’s important to say that you don’t know what you’re doing. Also, I am paying attention to this topic, and wanting to learn more about how trust is built. One of my hypotheses is that trust is mostly built by the sort of honesty Phil modeled.)