We need to stop rewarding the wrong kinds of nonprofit leaders if we are ever going to have lasting change in our communities. I wrote last month about my question to Kathleen Enright, the dynamic leader of GEO:
(Hopefully) the generational shift will drive more professionalism of the sector with more focus on effectiveness and management.
Clearly, I wasn’t all that satisfied with her answer, even though I do want to believe that scenario will be the case eventually. What I keep wondering though, is how it will come to be the case if foundations and other kinds of grantmakers keep rewarding the kind of leader that simply gets lots of things accomplished through the organization, albeit with no real sense of long-term planning or management. I see this a lot in looking at which nonprofits get the biggest slices of the fundraising pie, who funders laud as being “effective” with their dollars. Sure, they get the work done, but those nonprofits also tend to be the places where workers never go home at a decent hour, lack adequate infrastructure for growth, have no sucession plan, and have boards as diverse as a stack of pancakes. This why I probably keep thinking about it.
Although there are programs here locally like the Washington Post Nonprofit Excellence Award and the Meyer Foundation’s Exponent Award, I really don’t see a significant shift in how we are rewarding leadership in nonprofits. Why are we so consumed with focusing resources on the kinds of leaders that serve a lot of clients, when they don’t have enough capacity for the long-term? I take issue with the many nonprofit organizations currently being applauded today who:
- Don’t have any structures in place to serve those same numerous clients if and when the CEO leaves the organization
- Don’t care or think about staff development, and don’t take the time to figure out why there may be high turnover
- Don’t invest staff time to think of ways to do the work smarter, not harder, keeping people at the office until all hours of the night
- Fundraise for growth’s sake, not because of real community need
- Have no sense of the need for diversity among staff and board
- Don’t evaluate the CEO to make sure she is managing the entire organization
- Don’t evaluate their programs, or if they do, don’t adjust their services to reflect what they’ve learned
These thoughts are some of the reasons I was so fascinated when I recently discovered a wiki about capacity building from Curtis Brown and the Mission Movers Group. The wiki highlights an interesting draft report about the reasons that traditional capacity building flat-out fails for many nonprofits. The single most important contributing factor: the kind of leadership in place at the organization. Inadequate leadership for the long-term = no lasting change in terms of increasing nonprofit capacity. The Mission Movers’ report references the popular Jim Collins book Good to Great and the Social Sectors, and points out:
While there may not be a causal relationship between capacity building and board development, there certainly is one between the type of leadership and the impact an organization has. Foundations, corporations and major donors focus their wealth on the nonprofit CEO that gets things done. Our culture is obsessed with “can do” people. We love people who tell us what they are going to do, and then go do it.
There is nothing wrong with successful programs, but the sad part… is that they eat through staff and the impact of the organization is only powerful while they are there. Once this leader leaves, the community has been plowed through; quality staff burned out and people left were not given the infrastructure to continue the process.
It seems counter-intuitive that the people who get things done are the problem. It is easy to understand how, in a world of inaction, why foundations have been attracted to Level 4 leaders. They are charismatic, make things happen and they make your annual report look good. The bigger problem though, is that they don’t bring lasting change. This highly capable group that is “Good” has kept the organization and the surrounding people/community from becoming Great.
What do you think? Are we in the nonprofit sector shooting ourselves in the foot by rewarding the wrong kinds of leaders? Or does anyone have an answer to the Anonymous commenter to this blog, who wonders,
I agree with the Perspectives in terms of resistance to change, but it doesn’t address other issues of leadership that sink nonprofits. It seems that the simple human factor of individual capacity in the leadership and their personnal issues are not reflected in the “fear of change” theory. I’m talking about general incompetance of ED, board members and board chair. My question that I’ve been seeking the answer to is how does staff, that knows all these things, and holding aside their own shortcomings, respond? Or report? I’ve found the lack of resources for nonprofit staff to be very disturbing. I’ve worked for 20 years in nonprofits.
