Mordy Walfish, COO of Leading Edge and a faculty member at the Spertus Institute, gave a workshop on belonging in the workplace. Spertus shares this blog post summarizing key takeaways.

Belonging in the Workplace: Takeaways from a Spertus Workshop

Reflecting on Leading Edge's 2022 acquisition of Boardified in this article for The Wexner Foundation, Leading Edge Chief Operating Officer Mordy Walfish highlights the interplay between technical and emotional factors, as well as the importance of transparent communication, in facilitating a smooth integration.

"Over the past year, I’ve had the fascinating opportunity to play a key role in the acquisition and subsequent integration of one organization into another. This process turned out to be equal parts technical and emotional, and the biggest thing I learned in this process is to keep both parts front and center. Not only are the technical and the emotional both important levels of the work in any collaboration, but each affects the other profoundly, and the line between them can blur."

Leading Edge, where I’m privileged to serve as COO, is a fast-growing, eight-year-old, non-profit focused on helping Jewish organizations improve their workplace culture and leadership so that they can better achieve their missions. Just over a year ago we acquired Boardified, a fiscally sponsored initiative focused on strengthening board leadership in the Jewish non-profit sector. The impetus for the acquisition appeared to be technical: Leading Edge’s work necessarily included strengthening board leadership alongside professional leadership, so why have more than one organization focused on these efforts? While this technical rationale is certainly valid on its own terms, there were major emotional dimensions at play that helped drive the ability to realize and act on it. First, there was the humble recognition on the part of Leading Edge’s CEO, Gali Cooks, and that of our leadership, that this area of work was one in which Leading Edge was struggling to gain traction, despite multiple efforts to do so. We perceived Boardified as serving as a major and necessary boon to us achieving our mission, rather than a competitor of sorts that we needed to “beat”, as is sometimes the case in non-profit mergers.

On the Boardified side, they were coming to the conversation from a place of strength — they were thriving yet wanted to be a part of something bigger. They put ego and brand aside to focus on mission alignment and constituents, which truly made all the difference.

At the same time, saying “yes” to this acquisition required both organizations to undergo a shift in their own self-perceptions. Leading Edge was accustomed to being the young, small, scrappy startup. In fact, at the time of the acquisition, we had only been an independent non-profit ourselves for five years, and we had grown from a staff of three to 13 in that time. Leaning into the role of the acquiring partner meant that we had to take a close, hard look at our systems to ensure they were ready; to ask our staff to absorb exponential change, amidst an always-changing environment; and remind ourselves that there is no going back to being an under-the-radar organization — we were putting our stake in the ground and positioning ourselves to be a major player in new spaces. On Boardified’s side, they had to take a new perspective on their work — from the team, culture, and programs they had built to the relationships and image they had so carefully fostered — and move away from their fiscally sponsored model into being a fully integrated part of an organization three times their size. This was also a tremendous shift. Both Leading Edge and Boardified leaning into these new identities played a key role in moving the acquisition ahead. While all sides experienced loss, each of our organization’s relative newness onto the scene of North American Jewish life — and our evolving organizational identities — helped us embrace the change and see the process through. There was nothing so entrenched that couldn’t be called into question.

Leaning into the role of the acquiring partner meant that we had to take a close, hard look at our systems to ensure they were ready; to ask our staff to absorb exponential change, amidst an always-changing environment; and remind ourselves that there is no going back to being an under-the-radar organization — we were putting our stake in the ground and positioning ourselves to be a major player in new spaces.

The Technical, the Emotional, and the Both

You may wonder why we’re giving our team yet another day off, so soon after the Jewish holidays gobbled up most of October. The answer is, democracy. 

In addition to giving our team the day off, we’ve encouraged them to volunteer to be a poll worker at their local precinct. We’re hoping that at least 25% of our team will choose to volunteer in this way.

In doing this, we are joining a larger movement along with many other Jewish organizations. The Jewish Partnership for Democracy is a transpartisan Jewish network supporting free, fair, safe, and accessible elections.

Leading Edge is not a political organization. We work with Jewish organizations across a wide range of ideologies, representing different missions, sizes, denominations, and other forms of difference, to help them improve whatever they do, by focusing on culture, people, and leadership. We are a resource for the entire Jewish communal field, not an institution advancing any one of the many political visions or coalitions that belong to it. 

So why are we choosing this form of civic involvement—specifically regarding elections? Here are three reasons we’re doing so.

We recognize that our employees are full human beings embedded in larger social networks, and we strive to make that recognition real in the ways our team experiences their employment with us. In our time off policies, our benefits package, our scheduling choices, and so much more, we work hard to provide support for our employees as family members and caregivers. In our donation match policy, we support employees as philanthropists. 

In much the same way, in this new choice to close on Election Day and encourage electoral volunteering, we support them as citizens participating in a democracy. We remove any sense of tension they might have felt between being a good employee and being an engaged citizen on that day. This is a benefit to the employees, who are not required to participate in the election, but are given extra convenience and encouragement.

One of the beautiful things about organizations in the Jewish nonprofit sector is that they serve and benefit people beyond the Jewish community. They rely on their broader communities for safety, support, partnership, and engagement. They benefit from nonprofit tax status, as well as the kinds of stability, prosperity, and rule of law that (at least ideally) benefits everyone. For Jewish nonprofits who live in democratic societies, the democracy around us is part of the overall environment that keeps us running. Paying the electric bill isn’t in our mission statement either—but we’d better do it if we want to keep the lights on. Similarly, Jewish organizations must be good organizational citizens. 

Organizational good citizenship doesn’t need to mean taking a partisan position about who wins an election, but it can mean taking a civic position in favor of a flourishing democracy in which every citizen has access to participation in elections that are free, fair, and trusted.

At Leading Edge, we are by no means democracy experts, but we do know a lot about how cultures in an institution change over time. And here’s one of the things we know about culture: You can’t run a thriving culture in maintenance mode. Healthy cultures balance competing interests and tendencies; they strive to transcend biases and focus on collective goals; they constantly practice fairness. They do all of these things actively, not passively; they maintain and build these “muscles” by using them. Organizations and leaders who put time, effort, and resources into generating supportive and excellent cultures will see those cultures grow and develop; those who neglect them will see those cultures decay. Standing still with no change is simply a fiction; it doesn’t happen—or not for long. Stagnation will lead to decline.

Those culture dynamics exist within organizations—and they can just as easily exist in a nation. They can apply to a culture of useful feedback, or a culture of diversity and inclusion—or to a culture of democracy. 

So whether you’re thinking as an organizational leader or as an individual, remember that a culture of democracy doesn’t maintain itself. It needs our participation in order to work. 

And if you’re managing people this November 8th in the United States, consider giving them the day off.

You may wonder why we’re giving our team yet another day off, so soon after the Jewish holidays gobbled up most of October. The answer is, democracy.

Why We’re Closing Election Day and Encouraging Our Team to Be Poll Workers

Writing in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Leading Edge COO Mordy Walfish discusses what it means to have a truly human hiring process.

“It’s hard to admit this, but in the early days of Leading Edge (the nonprofit where I’m COO), our hiring processes were weak. We didn’t really know what we were looking for, and we didn’t have systems that helped us reach clarity. We would put vague job descriptions out into the world and ultimately not hire for the role because we never quite found someone who fit the bill. That was a failure of our systems rather than a reflection of the candidates we reviewed or the state of talent in our sector.”

Mordy explains that two years ago, with the help of Kristen Dore and the team at Voyager Consulting, we completely redesigned recruitment and hiring at Leading Edge.

“Our goals? We wanted to hire the best candidates from a diverse pool, and we wanted candidates to experience our values as they interacted with us. We envisioned a human process that treated applicants as equals, giving them the chance to evaluate a potential mutual fit between the role and themselves. Throwing one’s hat in the ring can take a lot of courage, especially when the work is so entangled with our identities and sense of purpose. For those who did not get a job with us, we hoped to leave them intrigued about working in the nonprofit world. We wanted people to feel better, not worse, about themselves after pursuing a job at Leading Edge.”

The results, Mordy explains, “have been outstanding." And it's not only we who think so; we've received positive feedback from outside leaders and organizations who have seen our job postings, as well as from people who have applied for jobs but were not hired.

Here, drawn from Mordy's article, are six important things we do differently now at Leading Edge:

Highlight skills, not credentials. We work hard to first understand and then communicate in the job posting, what it will take to succeed in the job that is open. That means defining with crystal clarity what the person will do, who they’ll work with, and what skills and traits they’ll need. We avoid asking for credentials like specific academic degrees or years of experience, because those aren’t the things we actually need, and requiring them might lead us to overlook amazing candidates or discourage some from applying. When we know the skills and traits we need, we put them into a rubric and evaluate candidates based on that rubric—not on random feelings or reactions we may have. That keeps us away from phrases like “not a cultural fit,” or “my gut tells me…,” which are ways of staying trapped in bias and vagueness.

Create job postings with all the information. Among the other basic details (full-time/part-time, location, skills, etc.), we always specify the salary range in our job postings, which goes a long way toward equity and to ensuring that no one’s time is wasted. We give people much more than the minimum information. We create an extensive FAQs document for every role, and link to it from the job posting. This keeps all applicants informed, democratizes access to information, and mitigates advantages for people who know the organization. Here’s one recent example of an FAQ. It shares information such as day-to-day role activities, what success looks like after one year, a little about the role’s supervisor, and even what might be challenging in the role…

Cast a wide net. To get the most quality and diversity into consideration, we post our opportunities in many places — from LinkedIn, Idealist.org, and the major job aggregators to outlets like CareerHub and the Hire Black Initiative. For each recruitment, we mobilize all staff to spread the word to their networks. At the same time, we don’t want to create an unfair advantage for people we know. So, if someone reaches out to a staff member to chat about a role or ask us to “put in a good word,” we say no. (We do allow staff and other stakeholders to share thoughts about candidates in the final stage.) Even if a staff member knows of a great candidate at the start, we still post the job and consider that person among other candidates. This can both alleviate bias and ensure we find the genuinely best fit for the role.

Bye, bye to cover letters. Many organizations require cover letters and judge applicants based on how well they write them — even if writing letters has nothing to do with the job. Instead of cover letters, we have each candidate submit a video introduction, which lets them show other forms of intelligence and personality and gives us a more multi-dimensional picture of applicants.

Avoid groupthink. We create a hiring committee that represents different perspectives within the organization, in terms of organizational operations and demographics. These team members review each candidate separately — evaluating them on a rubric without knowing what other team members think. Only after each person evaluates candidates separately, do we talk about them together.

Structured interviews. To minimize bias and allow for the best apples-to-apples comparisons of candidates, we keep interview questions consistent for all candidates and evaluate their answers based on our prepared rubrics. Research has shown that structured interviews with evaluation on predetermined criteria are much better predictors of future performance than improvised conversations. Keeping all interviews close together in time (within one or two days) also reduces recency bias.

Writing in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Leading Edge COO Mordy Walfish discusses what it means to have a truly human hiring process, and shares six steps Leading Edge has taken recently to improve.

Humanize Your Hiring Process — Here’s Why and How | Mordy Walfish, Leading Edge

Humanize Your Hiring Process — Here’s Why and How

In a presentation for JPro moderated by Laura Herman, Leading Edge COO Mordy Walfish discussed Leading Edge's findings on the gender gap in top leadership in Jewish nonprofits.

Video: Mordy Walfish Speaks to JPro on the Gender Gap in Jewish Leadership

The roughly one-year mark since pandemic restrictions began, along with a new phase of vaccine progress, converge to create a milestone moment. We sat down with seven leaders of Jewish organizations—all alumni of our CEO Onboarding Program—to take stock of the lessons they will remember from the eventful past year, and the insights they’ll bring into the future.

Paul Bernstein
CEO, Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools

Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal
CEO, The Rabbinical Assembly

Addie Goodman
President & CEO, JCC Chicago

Heather Moran
CEO and Executive Director, Sixth & I

Rabbi David Rosenn
Executive Director, Hebrew Free Loan Society

Miryam Rosenzweig
President and CEO, Milwaukee Jewish Federation

Todd Schenk
CEO, Jewish Social Service Agency (JSSA), Rockville, MD

In March 2020, what went through your heads when you first understood the severity of the pandemic?

Addie Goodman: I don't think any of us, and certainly not I, had any inkling how long the true crisis would last. I wasn't prepared to engage in months of crisis management. I'd never done that before. Even though we’d had bomb threats and other shorter crises in the past, this was totally new territory. And if I had been aware of the length of this situation, then I would have guided my team differently. Honestly, I would have supported myself differently. I just didn't realize that the adrenaline was going to have to last for a year. 

Rabbi David Rosenn: When COVID hit, we thought, “Okay, here’s something we know how to do.” And we stood up a stripped-down version of our general-needs loan that would be much more accessible to people, because we figured there would be extra costs associated with illness, childcare, and more. Then, three days later, it became utterly clear that this was not just a “respond-with-the-tools-you-already-have-in-your-toolbox” kind of situation. So I suggested to my board that we just to tell everybody to stop repaying their loans. Debt forgiveness — we've never done that before. And we did that for four months. And that’s cash flow; that's lifeblood for us. So that was not an easy decision, but I think everybody felt that clearly this was the right thing to do. 

“If I had been aware of the length of this situation, then I would have guided my team differently. Honestly, I would have supported myself differently. I just didn't realize that the adrenaline was going to have to last for a year. ”

Early on in the pandemic, we heard from some CEOs, “This is not the job I signed up for.” And from others we heard, “My organization was made for moments like this.” Where were your reactions on that spectrum?

Heather Moran: When COVID hit us, I had the most intense feeling of imposter syndrome that I've had since I took this job. I know I’m well-positioned for my role, I love it, I love the organization, and I understand it. But I was completely overwhelmed by the feeling that decisions that I would make would make everything unravel. Having said that, I feel incredibly proud and energized. We ended up working so well together doing things that we never imagined we would do. We decided to double down on local work in the arts community, creating programs to help local artists, in ways we had never done before.

Paul Bernstein: When COVID hit our community, schools were dramatically affected right from the start. So we did things very quickly. Jewish day schools did have—if not necessarily a playbook for this—we had experience with responding to things like Parkland, Harvey, Pittsburgh. As a network of day schools, Prizmah was ready to facilitate rapid information-sharing among schools, since in COVID, no one knew exactly what to do. The Monday of the week of Purim is when we had the first major webinar about how to run a school online, led by the first school that did it. They had all of two days’ experience by that point—but they were ready to share what they were learning. It gave the rest of our network a head start for what was to come. Our team was listening to what was going on and channeling the needs and effort of the schools. My job was to back what they were learning, and provide space for rapid, fast-changing responses.

For yourselves and your teams, how have you dealt with burnout and emotional challenges?

Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal: I feel some responsibility to model what I really want rabbis in the field to be doing and what I want my staff to be doing, which is to create boundaries and to create time for self-care. So, much more than any time in my career, I’ve been focused on that piece. And I'm public about it; I show myself on my bike on Facebook. If I'm taking a day off, I write something about it. Because I don't think anybody thinks I'm lazy, but I do want them to see that I'm publicly taking that time, because I want them to do the same.

Miryam Rosenzweig: We are all living and working through this pandemic. It’s not business as usual, its compounded by the fact that we are all home, taking care of our lives while work hovers. I learned that it is important to speak about the challenges. So I talked about it in a staff meeting; I said, “I suffer from anxiety.” And saying it out loud to my team was very, very freeing for me. The number of people who reached out for support afterward was incredibly restorative for me, and helped me understand the different stresses facing of my team. This was a vulnerable leadership moment and I did it intentionally to create an environment where we can speak about challenges and support each other.

Heather Moran: I find myself doing a lot more triangulating between team members, trying to help everyone see that everybody is going through a lot right now. So many of people are struggling and taking things more personally than before, and I’m having so many conversations about dynamics in the workplace. We spend time in team meetings talking about things like giving people grace, benefit of the doubt, that kind of thing. I feel a responsibility to do this work, but also, I'm not a social worker. I’m realizing that actually, it isn't my job to make sure that everybody on my team is happy. That isn't in my job description. It is in my job description to make sure that everybody on our team has the tools that they need to feel supported in their work, but that's different from being responsible for their individual and personal happiness.

“I talked about it in a staff meeting; I said, ‘I suffer from anxiety.’ And saying it out loud to my team was very, very freeing for me.”

What has changed about your relationships with your boards?

Todd Schenk: The ability of board members to relate to what is so important in our services right now, because they are also living it, has fostered a different kind of connection to the work. Suddenly they’re not talking about somebody else's issue that we’re responding to; they can see it in themselves, their neighbors, and their own family members—the impact of isolation, the impact of trying to school children at home, the impact of not being able to visit a parent who's in a facility. All of those things are very much part of each of our lives and our board members’ lives as well. So a lot of our board members have now invested even more in being able to share in the response of the agency.

Miryam Rosenzweig: We often talk about the essential partnership between our lay leadership and the professionals. We felt the partnership in a completely new light. Our board chair joined every internal COVID response meeting, even though in the early days of the pandemic, we were meeting six times a week. Our board met weekly for months to ensure we can make decisions and respond quickly to the community. My team and I felt the partnership with our lay counterparts in a deeper way. We were in the trenches together. We struggled with the challenges, disagreed and then we had to rely on each other’s knowledge and role to get things done. How has the partnership changed? It’s forever transformed.

“The ability of board members to relate to what is so important in our services right now, because they are also living it, has fostered a different kind of connection to the work.”

What were your experiences as Jewish organizational leaders during the protests, unrest, and conversations taking place about racial injustice over the summer? 

Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal: Both the Rabbinical Assembly and USCJ signed on to a communal letter supporting Black Lives Matter. I'm proud we did so, and there's a lot more we need to be doing. I got lots of very pleased responses and a number of very critical ones. And getting a gauge for where our people are in the Conservative movement on these issues, it turns out, is very complex. We have a fairly complicated community around these issues, and it was a wake-up call, but not everybody was woken up in the same direction.

Todd Schenk: As a service organization, we're used to dealing with the impact of discrimination on people's lives. But it's really hard to acknowledge our own role in causing that pain. That's not usually our place—our place is to try to fix something that happened to somebody, something that we were not involved in. So stepping up as an organization to acknowledge our own role in structural racism is painful. Our approach was to clean up our own house before we start making proclamations about what needs to happen in the rest of society. And we met with some skepticism internally about whether we were being reactive to a social movement and our commitment would wane the minute that media attention subsided. But our commitment is to sustain a focus on these issues and really understand and address how they're impacting our organization. We're an organization where a third of our clientele are People of Color, 60% of our staff are People of Color and our board is zero People of Color. That's a pretty stark picture of who we are as an agency. And it’s something that our board recognizes needs to be addressed. So there's been a response, there have been some learnings, but we're nowhere near a final destination.

“It was a wake-up call, but not everybody was woken up in the same direction.”

Will society learn lessons or change on the other side of this pandemic?

Paul Bernstein: It's going to take time to figure out what is going to change permanently, or to what extent the pendulum will swing back to old habits. I do think there are things that we can look forward to being different. That might be in collaborative spaces, for example—collaborations across the Jewish community. And maybe we’ll truly recognize the value of what we had before COVID. In the day school world, the reasons why these schools have done so incredibly well is because K-12 education is about so much more than getting grades, which was always true, yet has been recognized and appreciated much more during the pandemic. A great education is driven by our values. It is about whole child development and their mental health. It is about family. It is about community. And of course it’s about excellent academics. Jewish schools are actually very good at all these things, but weren't appreciated for them in quite the way they are now.

Addie Goodman: A number of people have said to me, “I used to commute an hour each way. I'm not doing that again. No way, that is not the life I want to lead.” I think that this time with family, the time with our spouses and our children, this unexpected time together, has given us a focus on family that we haven't had as a society in a very long time. And we're talking about what's core to being human. How do I want to live my life? What is the society I want to live in? How can I help build that society? We’re internalizing, and acting upon, these questions in new ways.

The Pandemic, the Future, and Jewish Organizations: Leaders Reflect

In her now-famous study on leadership, Tina Kiefer, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Warwick, asked participants to draw a picture of an effective leader. 

She found, not surprisingly, that the overwhelming number of people – no matter their gender – drew a white man. This study points to the fascinating way in which a particular mental model of leadership shapes both how we see the world and how we might imagine our future, as well as our unconscious biases of what a leader looks like. And it begs the question: what might we as a community achieve if we work to expand our mental models of leadership?

The recent report from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) articulates a number of core challenges to attracting and retaining top talent for the Jewish nonprofit sector. In particular, it makes a strong case that without increased career development opportunities and resources for Jewish professionals, it will be challenging for them to succeed in their current roles and to advance into new leadership roles. These are indeed the very challenges that led to the founding of Leading Edge in 2014. And over the past five years, we have been working with our partners to nurture emerging leaders and to support organizations to create the kinds of workplaces that attract the best and brightest.

Through this work, one thing has remained clear: there is no talent crisis. There is no shortage of people ready to roll up their sleeves, enter our workforce, and advance to more senior roles. But all too often, our organizations are not ready for an expansive vision of who a leader is and what a leader looks like. Leading Edge believes it is in the interest of the entire Jewish community to have a vibrant sector that is able to recruit, develop, retain and advance leaders of all genders, races, abilities and sexual orientations. Doing so will require a great deal of intentionality and purpose.

Here are a few insights that Leading Edge has gleaned through our work that may help us all address challenges related to leadership development and retention.

If we want to recruit diverse talent to both join and grow in our organizations, we need to ensure that our cultures are built to empower a diversity of voices. The 2019 Leading Edge Employee Experience Survey found that while 70% of the employees surveyed believed that their organizations valued diversity, only 53% actually built diverse teams. There is a gap between our aspirations and our actions. To narrow this gap, we need, as Suzanne Feinspan articulates, to support our leaders in examining the implicit biases that we all carry and bring to bear on our work; we need to empower staff with language and skills around equity and inclusion and get board buy-in for creating inclusive organizational cultures. We need to create workplaces that promote trust, respect and psychological safety, making space for courageous conversations that honor diverging perspectives. This not only aligns with our Jewish values, but it also drives stronger outcomes because of the innovation that occurs through the meeting of diverse perspectives.

We also need to ensure that our workplaces are free of harassment, discrimination and abuse. This is something that I think a lot about as a male in a field in which 70% of employees identify as female. I am aware of – and know that I still can learn more about – the opportunities I have been given and the way in which my voice has often been privileged over female colleagues because of my gender.

We’re all familiar with the old adage “what got you here won’t get you there.”

Given the deeply networked and at times familial nature of our sector, recruitment and hiring in our field is often done in an informal and unstructured way and, more often than not, people hear about jobs through their connections. Networking to find talent can be a tremendous asset – and a tremendous liability that excludes talented and qualified candidates from landing roles because they do not hold the same kinds of relationships with connectors in the community.

Leading Edge recently published a CEO Search Committee Guide, which among other things contains extremely helpful advice from feminist leader Shifra Bronznick, founder of Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community, on eliminating bias from the process of hiring a new CEO. Bronznick stresses that search committees should run an entirely structured process, from how resumes are rated to how interviews are assessed. Assessors should rate each candidate independently before knowing the ratings from other committee members. This will help eliminate groupthink where bias thrives.

The recent study commissioned by the Jews of Color Field Building Initiative finds that at least 12-15% of the 7.2 million Jews in the United States are Jews of Color. Though we’ve seen emerging efforts to support the leadership of Jews of Color in our community, it is clear that our workforce is nowhere close to representing our community.

Oftentimes the language of “cultural fit” is used to exclude candidates from under-represented groups, such as candidates of color, from being hired. The term cultural fit, which originated in the 1980s, refers to screening potential candidates to determine what type of cultural impact they might have on an organization (e.g. do they align with the values, beliefs and norms of the organization?) While we certainly believe in the importance of cultural alignment, we also see the way in which the language of “cultural fit” may be used to exclude candidates who bring an under-represented identity or perspective to the organization. This feels all the more live in our community, where a prerequisite to being hired is often previous work in or familiarity with the Jewish community. If we think about the history of those who may have been excluded from mainstream Jewish life, it is not hard to see how focusing on “cultural fit” in hiring processes can result in maintaining a certain level of homogeneity in our organizations.

We know in our hearts that the opportunities for leadership are as diverse as the people who make up our community and we are constantly thinking about how we might support and amplify a wide range of models of leadership. We are inspired by such efforts both in our community, such as Yavilah McCoy wrote about recently and models of leadership beyond our immediate community.

People often ask if Leading Edge will create a separate area of work to tackle issues such as women’s leadership. In fact, we are embarking on a project – generously funded by the Genesis Prize Foundation and the SafetyRespectEquity Coalition – to understand and address the root causes of the gender gap in leadership in our community. However, critically, we plan to integrate the learnings and actionable items from this project into all of our efforts, rather than maintaining it as a separate line of work.

This approach, we believe, is indicative of the urgency and possibility we see now in the Jewish leadership space. Yes, we need to act now to fill the void of leadership – and the diversity of leadership – throughout the Jewish community. And yes, the talent exists to support a new generation of Jewish leaders, reflecting an expanding mental model of leadership. We are learning about effective strategies to cultivate this development in long-lasting ways, and we share these learnings to help the field. Together, let’s support the talent within our community, welcome new talent, and continue to change how Jewish leaders are supported – and who Jewish leaders are.

This article originally appeared in eJewish Philanthropy on August 8, 2019.

Leading Edge COO Mordy Walfish reflects on the importance of building a sector comprised of diverse leadership in this installment of a Jim Joseph Foundation series on Leadership Development.

A Path Forward in Jewish Leadership Development

Mordy Walfish is Chief Advancement Officer at Leading Edge, inspiring stakeholders to invest in the most valuable asset of the Jewish nonprofit sector — its people. From 2017-2024, Mordy served as Chief Operating Officer of Leading Edge, partnering with the CEO and Board to build Leading Edge into the organization it is today. Prior to joining Leading Edge, Mordy was Vice President for Programs at Repair the World. He is a Wexner Graduate Fellow, Schusterman Senior Fellow, and the winner of the 2015 JPro Network Young Professional Award. Mordy is a certified leadership coach and serves on the faculty of the Spertus Institute and New Ventures West. He recently relocated from Brooklyn, NY to Oakland, CA.

Chief Advancement Officer

Mordy Walfish

Mordy Walfish is  Chief Operating Officer at Leading Edge.