A Fellowship Gives Up-and-Coming Managers a Boost to Leadership

About one in every 10 executive-director positions at nonprofit organizations in the Washington metropolitan area turns over each year, representing roughly 250 jobs. A two-year-old program run by the Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington seeks to better prepare the people in the pipeline that’s aimed toward those opportunities.

The roundtable, which advocates for charities and grant makers in the region, is currently vetting applications for its Future Executive Directors Fellowship. The program brings together 25 local up-and-coming nonprofit managers who aspire to lead their own organizations.

This boot camp’s first season, which ended in March 2009, has already spawned some commanders: Of the first group of 25 fellows, five have moved into executive-director roles.

The fellowship program, say its organizers, presents a model for training aspiring executives that could be easily duplicated in other parts of the country.

Among the grant makers that support the program has been the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, in Washington, which contributes roughly $25,000 annually to the fellowship out of the $75,000 it has given each of the past two years to the roundtable for operating costs. The foundation’s director of programs, Rick Moyers, believes the fellowship—and training sessions like it—are essential in tough economic times.

“Sometimes people are finding themselves in leadership positions sooner than they anticipated,” Mr. Moyers says. “And sometimes it’s related to the economic downturn, which makes it all the more urgent for us to have a robust pipeline.”

But conversely, he says, “a lot organizations are so focused on the here and now and their immediate survival that they might not be thinking about building a pipeline of leaders.”

Hard and Soft Skills

Over 12 monthly, daylong meetings (expanded from nine, in the first class), fellows are given training in hard skills, like financial management and fund raising, and soft ones, like negotiation and balancing their work and professional lives. They meet many current local executives for candid conversations about the demands of the top job, and each fellow is matched with a mentor who runs a local nonprofit organization, or has done so in the past.

Also, says Chuck Bean, who heads the Nonprofit Roundtable, each fellow is also assigned a “stretch assignment.” For example, he says, someone who has never worked much with a board of directors might join a board as a way to build those skills.

The Meyer Foundation helped jump-start the fellowship program when it helped sponsor a 2008 report called “Ready to Lead,” which found that one-third of younger nonprofit workers hoped to become executive directors one day.

At the Nonprofit Roundtable, “Ready to Lead” was read with interest, says Rosetta Thurman, a consultant who oversees the Future Executive Directors Fellowship (and writes a leadership blog called Leading Edge for The Chronicle). To help support their member groups in their efforts to replace leaders who were leaving their jobs, the roundtable decided to focus on people who were on a path toward an executive role but were not quite ready to assume it.

Access to Leaders

The resulting program, designed with the advice of nonprofit leaders and the recruiters who hire them, “assumes that the fellows already have some level of leadership skills,” Ms. Thurman says. “What they really need is to hear from the executive directors themselves. How did they approach challenges in their job? What’s the job really like? What do they wish they had known before they became an E.D.? And that’s not something you’ll learn in a master’s-degree program.”

The most valuable aspect of the fellowship, say alumni, is the access it has given them to local executive directors.

The leaders have been remarkably candid about the heavy demands of their jobs and the price the work sometimes exacts from them, says Ms. Thurman. One executive, she recalls, “talked about the health issues she’d been having, and why she had to leave [a] job, because her health got so bad.”

Amanda Andere, 30, won her first executive director job in April 2009, a month after completing the fellowship. She leads Facets, a group in Fairfax, Va., that runs on about $1.8-million annually and focuses on preventing homelessness.

“I was surprised during the program how much the nonprofit leaders leaned on each other,” Ms. Andere says. “Once you take on that role, the only people you have to confide in and bounce ideas off of are other nonprofits. That was very important to success. People who might be so-called competitors were actually working to support each other.”

Awareness of Risk

Alicia Wilson, 36, was promoted in January 2009 from development director to executive director of La Clínica del Pueblo, a grass-roots health organization that serves Latino clients in Washington and runs on a budget of $6.5-million annually. She found sessions on financial management—about which she had been “fairly blissfully ignorant”—helpful. (Mr. Bean points to “the big three” of board relations, financial management, and human resources as the skills the fellows most often seek to improve.)

Ms. Wilson says that an intensive, three-hour session on legal matters also made an impression. “I was so dizzy by the end of it,” she says. “But it made me more hyperaware of the risk and potential liabilities that every decision makes.”

Later, Ms. Wilson says, her charity, which runs community health clinics, had a situation with a patient that brought the session’s warnings about risk management back to mind. “The doctor who was treating her was trying to determine if we had done everything properly, and immediately, instead of saying, ‘Go with your gut, Doc, you did everything fine,’ we consulted with our pro bono attorneys,” Ms. Wilson says.

Another fellow, Nadine Duplessy Kearns, 36, was working as director of community relations for a charter school when she began the program and since January has run New Community for Children, a group in Washington that runs educational afterschool and summer programs. She says the fellowship gave her a better understanding of the need to diversify a charity’s mix of income sources. Her group, she says, which runs on an annual budget of $687,000, is “critically dependent” on two government grants; she is currently working with her board to cultivate other sources of support.

But Ms. Duplessy Kearns says the fellowship gave her more than just a better appreciation of fund raising. “It really allowed me to feel confident from day one, walking in the door,” she says. “I felt that I had the tools I needed to take on the challenge. Without the program, it would have taken me longer to get to this point.”

Money Squeeze

The program spends between $75,000 and $100,000 for each year’s group of 25 fellows, says Mr. Bean. Money comes from a variety of private and corporate donors, including the American Express Foundation, in New York, which often supports leadership programs.

However, as the economic slump has tightened the amount of money for professional development (and everything else) in the nonprofit world, the Nonprofit Roundtable is looking to make some adjustments to its program. In the past, the organization picked up the whole tab for fellows’ participation. But the next group of fellows, who will start training in September, will be paying some of the costs, says Ms. Thurman. Roundtable members will pay $250 for the program; nonmembers will pay $500.

Despite the money squeeze, Ms. Thurman believes the fellowship represents an inexpensive, collaborative model that organizations in other parts of the country could easily take up to improve their own pipelines of local nonprofit talent. They could bring emerging leaders together with current executive directors, she says, “even without doing a full-budget, full-fledged program.”

Efforts like the Future Executive Directors Fellowship need more support from grant makers, says Ms. Wilson, of La Clínica del Pueblo.

“At a nonprofit, we are almost exclusively self-taught,” she says. “As a development director, I just flew by the seat of my pants. I lucked into a mentor who sort of helped me go, but I was the most knowledgeable person about development in my organization of 60 people, and I had been doing it for a year and a half. And that’s wrong.”