Fay Twersky, vice president at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, recently launched The Listening Post, a monthly note dedicated to lifting up exceptional ideas, voices, and questions that can help all of us become more effective in our philanthropy. She’ll also share what the team at Hewlett is learning alongside its grantees.

An excerpt from the December edition is below:

As I get ready to leave my post to become the next president of the Arthur Blank Family Foundation in Atlanta, here are the lessons I have learned that I am taking with me:

It is possible to be practical, rigorous, and creative in philanthropy. Often, people assume there are irreconcilable trade-offs, especially with being rigorous. But, our Hewlett programs, working on a range of issues from performing arts to climate change, have proven otherwise.

Outcome-focused philanthropy is compatible with equity. In fact, being equitable in our approaches requires us to wrestle with hard questions and be clear and systemic in our contributions to healing and repairing the world.

Foundations have to be well-led and well-managed. Many years ago, Bridgespan came out with a report saying that nonprofits tend to be over-led and undermanaged. At the time, I thought the same was true for foundations. But Hewlett has shown the value of both leadership and management. Leadership holds the vision and gets the attention, but management is key to supporting staff to stretch and grow, be happier in their work, and freer to innovate.

When you listen to grantees and community, you learn things you didn’t know or hadn’t fully understood. These nine years have shown me it is possible to listen deeply, get past our blind spots, and be smarter about how we work and how we fund.

A healthy, resilient, productive, and joyful team can achieve amazing results. But it takes leadership and commitment from every seat. When I hired my executive assistant eight years ago, I knew she would be excellent at her job. But I didn’t know how she would step up as a leader, becoming in many ways the heart of our team. Similarly, our Organizational Learning Officer and Fellows stepped up in unexpected ways and, in fact, this was true for each position on the team.

Sometimes, it is the right thing to lead from behind. I learned this in a deeper way than ever before when I was part of a team designing a process for allocating $15 million in funding for anti-racism grants. The process was deeply meaningful for all involved and resulted in support for an incredible set of organizations. Those results were made possible because I stepped back so that my Black colleague could step up.

I now understand more fully that effective philanthropy also means paying attention to affective philanthropy. Yes, we need to do all the thinking and planning to be good stewards of philanthropic funds. But we also need to pay equal attention to the feelings side of the equation. As humans, we come to this work with passion and rich experiences, and making room for sharing these feelings makes the rest of the work sing.

Read the full Listening Post by Fay Twersky. Subscribe to the mailing here.