Nonprofit Leaders Suggest the Best Ways to Help Colleagues Succeed

IN THE TRENCHES

By Jeffrey Klineman

It was a bittersweet phone call for Jan Masaoka. As the executive director of CompassPoint, a nonprofit management consulting group in San Francisco, Ms. Masaoka had recently finished working with a local nonprofit organization.

Now someone from the group called to say it had decided it wanted more than consulting — it wanted the name of a headhunter, so that it could identify a candidate for a permanent position.

Ms. Masaoka told the caller she might be able to provide more than just a headhunter, however. She might actually have a candidate she could recommend from her staff r at CompassPoint. She took the employee aside to let her know about the opportunity.

In the end, her employee decided against pursuing the opportunity, but at the time, Ms. Masaoka’s faced a struggle that is common when nonprofit employers put effort into grooming employees for success. Sometimes, they find that they might have been so good at that grooming that their employees become valuable candidates for other positions.

Ms. Masaoka didn’t want to lose a reliable worker. But she nevertheless felt it was her duty as a good manager to tell her talented employee about an opportunity for career advancement, to groom her for success.

“Sometimes,” she says, “I think we serve the sector we work in the best by helping people move on in the sector.”

Helping talented employees develop leadership skills and succeed is a vital task because it simultaneously serves the organization, the employee, and the nonprofit field, say charity executives. Even the most gifted workers, say supervisors, can go only so far up the career ladder without well-timed boosts from their bosses. Because pay is generally lower at charities than at businesses, grooming takes on added importance for nonprofit workers. And one of the most prevalent management problems among smaller organizations — a lack of succession planning — can be mitigated when those at the top start recognizing younger workers as potential leaders.

“Beyond your mission, the most important asset you have is your people,” says Katherine Pease, acting executive director of the Denver chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “If you don’t develop the talent of your employees, it prevents them from carrying out your organization’s mission in the best way they might be able to. It’s really about maximizing your resources. And being in a sector that is chronically undercapitalized, you have to use what you have.”

Grooming talented employees helps create a better pool of candidates who flow to other positions in the nonprofit world, which is infamous for its high turnover rate. Grooming benefits all charities, even if the gifted workers choose not to stay at the organization that trained them, says Julia Fabris McBride, deputy director for programming at the Illinois Arts Alliance Foundation, an arts advocacy group in Chicago.

“We need to be grooming leaders as a field,” she says. “In so many of these smaller and midsize organizations, you really can’t expect a middle-level manager to stay around unless they know they’re headed up the ladder. So a lot of people move from organization to organization to move up the ladder, and that helps those organizations they move to.”

Avoiding Favoritism

Charity leaders should keep their eyes peeled for talent, and cast their gaze widely. All employees need to know they will have equal opportunities — and talent might not lie solely in leadership potential.

“Some managers prioritize certain skill sets over others,” Ms. Pease says. “But that can be wrong.”

At the Gill Foundation, in Denver, where Ms. Pease was the founding executive director, she noticed the efforts of a woman who worked in accounting. “She had no interest in being a communications professional, or a program director; she was just interested in keeping the books in the clearest, most precise way possible,” says Ms. Pease. “One skill set is sexier, but they’re both critically important to the functioning of the organization. You really need to value all of the skills of your employees.”

Impressions of favoritism might hurt organizational morale, and in the worst case, preferential treatment can border on discrimination. Managers need to be careful to provide the same opportunities for advancement to all of their employees, according to Michael Costa, a Boston lawyer who handles labor issues for nonprofit organizations. “Everybody should have the expectation that they can achieve similar goals to the extent they have similar skills and experience,” Mr. Costa says. “Promotions that aren’t based on skills or experience are, I think, inherently suspect.”

And managers need to be aware that even if they have “taken a shine” to a particular employee, that person still might not be the best one to push toward higher positions, says Ms. Masaoka.

“One of the biggest mistakes managers make is to overreward loyalty,” she says. “I think that within any organization, no matter how big or small, an executive director can feel beleaguered by the demands on them, and having a sense that somebody’s on their side, that can result in them misleading themselves. Just being aware that somebody who you feel is loyal to you or the organization, you have to be aware and think to yourself, Is that why I like this person?”

Managers take many approaches to inspiring employees and improving their skills. Here are some suggestions from nonprofit leaders:

Let workers stretch. Giving subordinates challenging tasks can push them to develop their abilities. Increased opportunities can translate into increased opportunities for staff members to fail, but that’s a gamble that must be taken for future leaders to develop, notes Roni D. Posner, executive director of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management, in Washington.

“If you want to see people excel, you have to make them willing to take risks,” she says. “If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning.”

Ms. Posner says she often gives people in different parts of her office responsibility for their own budgets. “If I’m going to figure out a way to spend money on a part of a project, and if my colleague has to make her own decision about something else related to it, maybe we can figure out a way to work together,” she says. “The learning is every day. We all groom each other.”

Encourage protégés to tag along. Introducing talented employees to new situations — even if they might not always have a role in those situations — can show them skills they need to learn, and also keep them motivated, says Robert Walker, executive director of the Management Center in San Francisco who was also a longtime executive at the San Francisco Opera.

“Sometimes you nurture people by letting them audit what you’re doing,” Mr. Walker says. “What I learned in management school about labor relations and negotiation is 180 degrees from how it really is, but I got taken under someone’s wing, and saw firsthand how it was done. It’s another example of how you learn your craft, a boss sort of saying, ‘You need to sit in on this negotiation because you’ll have to do this someday.’”

The encouragement is as valuable as the skills it builds, because it offers a glimpse of a possible future, Mr. Walker says. “When they bring you in to watch a negotiation or something like it,” he says, “they could just as easily have excluded you, but the fact that they didn’t is important.”

Share the spotlight. Managers can reward good work by providing employees chances to shine, says Elizabeth Bremner, executive director of the Foundation Incubator, a nonprofit organization in Palo Alto, Calif., that provides office space, advice, and other help to small foundations. “Giving a staff member an opportunity to present an issue to the board of directors showcases their work, and it’s a good opportunity to showcase that person, too,” she says. “It also establishes a connection to the board of directors, which they will need as they move up in the nonprofit world.”

“The most important thing we have learned is to let younger staff members have contact with the board,” echoes Ms. McBride. “That seems to be about the scariest thing and the biggest divider between those leadership roles and those in middle-management roles. The sooner you can get those potential leaders interacting with the board in a regular way, the sooner you’re really grooming someone for leadership. And it also gets the board a little closer to the work that the staff is doing.”

Pay attention to personal needs. Grooming isn’t simply about building “hard” management skills like budgeting or program design. Sometimes workers need to deal with personal needs, such as managing stress or communicating clearly, before they can reach their professional peaks.

“You nurture people in different areas,” Mr. Walker says. “Sometimes you do things that nobody else is particularly aware of. We had one staffer who had trouble dealing with people, and we privately set her up with a counselor to address some of those issues. When I was at the opera, I saw people who had terrific voices, but couldn’t walk across the stage without falling down. So you’d put them in touring companies, places they could perform a lot. It was a concentrated effort on developing the individual.”

The nonprofit field, observers say, may have an advantage over businesses when focusing on workers’ personal needs: Flexible scheduling and informal work environments are common at charities. “It’s important to recognize if you want to retain employees that there needs to be some balance in their lives,” Ms. Bremner says. “It’s important that employees can, where appropriate, have time to spend with their families in outside-of-work activities. Let them know you’re investing in them, and help them accommodate a balance in work and personal life.”

Sponsor professional development. While a great deal of grooming happens in the office, it can also occur in the wider world, through an employee’s involvement in another charity, a professional association, or elsewhere. While the nonprofit world has many opportunities for workers on the rise to meet and learn from each other, at times it is the manager’s job to make workers aware of those opportunities.

“I was lucky,” says Kimberly Otis, executive director of Women & Philanthropy, in Washington, a membership association of grant makers who support women’s charities. “As a junior staffer, my boss really pushed me forward. I’ve learned to do that as well, to get many people to join affinity groups, committees, boards of directors. It teaches skills you wouldn’t learn otherwise.”

Some employers recommend their most talented employees for “future leaders” programs that offer training, internships, and opportunities to meet others in the field in a formal setting, Ms. Otis says. “Adding those skills can benefit an organization,” she notes. “I have had experiences where I worked for a foundation and they didn’t want me to be involved in leadership elsewhere. It was very disempowering. People really gain loyalty when you let them out into the field.”

Wish protégés well when they move up — or on. At times, the only way for employees to fully realize their skills is for them to jump ship, Ms. Bremner says. At small organizations, she points out, “there are few positions to move into. Sometimes, it’s good to help people move on, because when employees have been with a group for a long period of time, they can stagnate.”

In a business in which doing good for clients is the predominant goal, managers may see grooming subordinates as an added burden, she acknowledges. “We’re dealing with the pressing social problems of our day,” she says. But, she adds, nonprofit workers “are incredibly dedicated. They’re not necessarily thinking of what’s in their own best interest, and as an employer and manager, it’s important to look at the needs of an employee. If that’s served by their going to another organization, so be it. You’re really a partner with an individual in their professional growth.”

What are the best ways for nonprofit managers to groom their employees for leadership? Join the discussion in the Share Your Brainstorms online forum.