What Does Resiliency Really Mean for Nonprofit Leaders and Their Organizations?

I declared that resilience was one of my themes for the new year. And, in writing a guest post about it over at the Packard Foundation’s Organizational Effective Blog, I shared the story of the boiling frog. If a frog is dropped into cold water in a sauce pan and brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. It is a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of threats that arise gradually.

Burnout is like boiling a frog gradually. As we describe it in our book, "The Happy Healthy Nonprofit," burnout is a state of emotional, mental and physical exhaustion that occurs when we feel overwhelmed by too many demands, too few resources and too little recovery time.