Lessons from “Emerging Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations”

 

The nonprofit leadership deficit is, by now, a well-known social sector challenge. The Bridgespan Group’s game-changing “The Nonprofit Sector’s Leadership Deficit” put stunning figures to the problem and, in the process, mobilized the sector. We are part of the movement it sparked.

While the issue is widely-recognized, however, there has not been a lot of research on what it takes to attract, develop and retain emerging nonprofit leaders. That is why I am so excited about the report “Emerging Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations: Myths, Meanings and Motivations”, developed by theAmerican Express Foundation and the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). Richard Brown from American Express and Karen Dyer and Kelly Hannum from CCL presented parts of their research in a recent webinar, and they crystallized important trends, motivators for nonprofit staff and recommendations.

As the 2009 Fellow at Year Up and ProInspire’s Program Director, the points around measuring, communicating and connecting impact resonated strongly with me. Here are a few of the things that I took away:

• Impact matters – to the emerging leader: While we know quantifying impact is important to funders, many organizations do not recognize how much it matters to the aspiring social sector leader. It makes sense: we accept lower pay to do this work because we care about impact. This does not mean that emerging leaders need to see a scorecard or have “warm, fuzzy” experiences every day. It does mean that we need to be able to articulate how our work translates into long-term impact: If an initiative flounders, what the organization has learned from it; if it succeeds, how our mission has benefited; if what we do is hard, why we are doing it. The executives at Year Up do this consistently, with Gerald Chertavian modeling the practice publicly on his blog. Here is one example.

• Metrics should be about learning, not “punishment”: If the sector is about impact, then what is keeping us from measuring it faithfully? I think the key challenge is that measuring can be a risky enterprise. A failure is not frequently seen as a step closer to success and, for nonprofits, it can mean the loss of valuable resources. My experience working at Year Up with Venture Philanthropy Partners (VPP) taught me how an investor and a partner organization can get this right. VPP works with their portfolio organizations to create metrics ahead of the investment, and then maintains an open dialogue about the organization’s progress throughout the year. In that dialogue, we shared hard metrics, talked about what our progress, and evaluated whether, given what we had learned so far, our plans were still the appropriate ones to get us to the right outcomes. The metrics were critical to learning and achieving our shared goals – not a tool for chastisement. For more on this (and measuring to outcomes well broadly), I have to recommend Mario Morino’s widely acclaimed “Leap of Reason.”

• Learning matters: Tying these two points together, a third take-away that emerges is that retaining aspiring leaders is about creating opportunities for learning. This is also addressed directly in the “Emerging Leadership” report, which also highlights the employees seek opportunities to mentor others. When employees are asking to learn more and to share their insights with others, there is a tremendous opportunity to take on-the-job learning to new heights.

Again, however, fully leveraging this interest hinges around having a culture where feedback is given consistently to praise and to encourage growth, and not to punish. A peer recently shared with me that she was struggling with providing feedback to a high-performing report. He was not ready for the promotion that he felt he deserved, but he would be on track if he would heed his managers’ feedback and invest in the next layer of skills he needed. Unfortunately, he seemed to have shut down and considered his lack of promotion “unfair.” When the time for his review came, my colleague deftly reframed the conversation. Instead of an assessment of how he was performing against his current role, she communicated the review in terms of whether he had “met” or was “in progress” for meeting the expectations for the next role. When the feedback became about challenging him to grow, rather than putting a label on his current performance, he gladly jumped into the conversation and left the room motivated to grow. It was simply a matter of reframing.

This medium won’t allow me to explore all the richness and depth of the “Emerging Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations” report. I encourage you to read it. Even a 5-minute skim will leave you with actionable, important reflections on how to retain and grow your organization’s next generation of leaders.