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Below is our recent interview with Patrick Jinks, Certified Leadership & Strategy Coach & President at The Jinks Perspective:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to The Jinks Perspective?
A: We sum it up in three words: clarity, simplicity, and alignment. We work mostly with nonprofits, though our leadership development and employee engagement work goes into the government and corporate sectors as well. The social sector is incredibly complex. Solving the world’s big social issues is a big job. What we help leaders do is make the complex simple. We help boards get crystal clear on their intentions and organizational imperatives, and then help nonprofit executives with the same world-class executive coaching that Fortune 500 CEOs enjoy, but at rates that nonprofits can afford.
Q: Patrick, tell us more about your background. What were you doing before The Jinks Perspective?
A: Well, given our mission that I just outlined, it probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that my background is in nonprofits. I spent 25 years in executive-level leadership in the social sector before launching my coaching business. I saw the gap that existed when it came to nonprofit leadership development, and decided to try to help fill that gap. Another former profession of mine is photography. The business name Jinks Perspective is a nod to that experience. I switched “lenses” to serve the sector from a different “perspective.” Now, I help leaders gain fresh perspective on challenges they face.
Recommended: Q: How do you achieve the mission you described?
A: Through coaching. There is no shortage of consultants in the nonprofit sector. And they are of great value. I operate as a consultant when needed, but the real value I bring is coaching. Instead of coming with prescriptive answers as a subject matter expert in an organization’s field, I come with the critical questions that will lead the organization’s leaders to a higher or deeper conversation about what matters. Coaching does for a leader’s mind what physical training does for an athlete’s body. Coaching trains muscle and stretches the coachee’s abilities beyond the ordinary into the extraordinary. It draws out and elevates the best thinking of the coachee, rather than presumptuously delivering the bias and opinions of the coach (or consultant).
Even our strategic planning facilitation is delivered through the coaching lens. We don’t tell boards what they should do. Instead, we help them get a clearer picture of where they are today, and where they want to be tomorrow. Then we help them shape a path to go there, and get them started down that path.
Q: What kind of training programs do you offer to your clients?
A: We do some training, particularly in the areas of board and employee engagement. But again, our primary work is still better described as coaching. In fact, one of the things we teach is how to coach effectively! Our most valuable resources are our strategic planning processes, executive coaching, board engagement coaching, and employee engagement measuring, training, and coaching.
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Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: We are more frequently engaged in helping organizations tell their stories more effectively. Today, we teach storytelling and digital marketing. Our next big project is in publishing anthologies for nonprofits in a way that they can tell their full story to their key audiences, and influence those audiences’ appetites for philanthropic investment in their missions. We plan the launch of our first book this year for nonprofits in my home state of South Carolina. It will feature nonprofit leaders as co-authors, and show how operational excellence leads to community change.
We also are getting closer to launching our first mastermind cohort of nonprofit CEOS who would not otherwise have access to executive coaching. We’ll go into a community and provide onsite group and one-on-one coaching in the areas of greatest need in the sector, like change leadership, employee engagement, decision making, and influence.
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