Charity Heads Who Leave Their Jobs Find New Roles In and Out of the Nonprofit Field

JOB MARKET

By Rebecca Gardyn

Everyone wakes up at least once in his or her life not wanting to go into work, but the morning it happened to Katie Sacco, it signified more than a case of the Monday blues.

“I woke up and realized I was tired of constantly worrying about the budget, fund raising, problematic board members, and volunteers who take more time to handle than the time they give,” says Ms. Sacco, who at the time was into her third year as executive director of Hands On San Francisco, a nonprofit organization that encourages volunteerism. “Most of all, I didn’t like feeling that I might have to lay off staff when I could no longer pay them from my shrinking budget.”

It was early 2000, Internet companies were booming, and Ms. Sacco decided to leave her position. She thought her nonprofit background and ideas for marketing on a shoestring would be appreciated by the start-ups. She was right, and ended up working for three Internet companies, all of which have since folded. Now, she is back in the job market, and, while she is considering a return to the nonprofit world, she is not sure whether she wants to head a charity again.

The impulse to leave nonprofit leadership roles is a common one, and when it strikes, many executives seek a life away from the stresses of heading charities — sometimes finding other roles in the nonprofit world, sometimes leaving that world altogether. While 85 percent of executive directors said they enjoy their jobs and their ability to help meet community needs, fewer than half said that they intend to lead another charity when they leave their current posts, according to a national survey of executive directors released late last year by CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, a management-consulting organization in San Francisco.

High levels of stress, long hours, lack of financial incentive, and a dearth of board support are the main reasons why charity leaders leave their jobs, says Hedy Helsell, executive director of the Center for Nonprofit Management, in Dallas. “Many executives feel a loss of control over their lives,” she says. “Their ability to garner funding is constantly changing, they are under-resourced, and they are working long hours to put out a million other fires. Eventually, it just becomes too much.”

There is, however, some good news for the nonprofit field: Most former charity leaders don’t stray very far from nonprofit work, says David Edell, president of Development Resource Group, a recruiting company in New York that works exclusively with nonprofit organizations. Even if they choose not to lead a charity again, many former executives use their expertise by filling other positions within the field, he says. In fact, the CompassPoint survey found that 59 percent of current executive directors who responded said that it is likely that their next job would be in the nonprofit world. Of those, about 15 percent said they would consider taking a staff position such as program director or development director, and another 11 percent may work as unpaid volunteers or take on board-governance roles. The career that executive directors are most likely to move on to, however, is consultant — a quarter of those polled cited that as their likely future job.

Ricki Baker, for one, left her role as executive director of the UJA-Federation of New York in 2001, an organization that supports dozens of Jewish health, human-service, and educational charities in New York and elsewhere, after three years to start a consulting business in Baltimore, where she specializes in marketing and strategic planning for both nonprofit and for-profit organizations. She left her nonprofit leadership role, she says, because she wanted more latitude to take risks and to have her effectiveness measured by more objective standards, like profits. Even so, her passion for the work of charities has kept her close to the field, and she says she chooses as clients only those groups whose missions she supports. She adds that her nonprofit experience gives her deeper knowledge of her clients’ needs. For instance, she is currently working with Legg Mason Trust, a trust- and asset-management company that assists charities in developing planned giving strategies. Ms. Baker is currently helping the company market donor-advised funds, which allow donors to open charitable accounts, receive tax deductions on their gifts, and recommend which charities should receive their money. “My nonprofit experience has helped me to understand the world in which Legg Mason is presenting this product and to shape the messages appropriately to the market,” she says.

Striking a Balance

Some former executive directors have left the world of charities altogether. Among charity leaders in the CompassPoint survey who said they did not plan to retire from their current position, about 17 percent expected to move into for-profit or government jobs. Many of these leaders end up in industries such as marketing, public relations, even sales. Yet even then, many look for employment choices that allow them an opportunity to advance the causes they care about.

Rodney Holcomb, for example, left his job in April as executive director of AIDS Arms, in Dallas, after five years at the helm and 16 years with the organization.

“I loved my job. It was a great reason to get up in the morning,” he says. He especially misses the opportunities he had to make a tangible difference in people’s lives, he adds, recalling one of his proudest accomplishments at the charity, which involved the takeover of a poorly run AIDS clinic in a neighborhood with great need. However, he notes, it was not uncommon for him to work 10- to 14-hour days, seven days a week.

“We helped a lot of people,” he says, “but at a point the balance between helping others versus the expense of my own personal life became out of whack.”

Today, Mr. Holcomb works in sales as an HIV specialist for the Dallas offices of Merck & Co., the pharmaceutical giant, where he has been able to transfer his experience with AIDS and HIV issues into a job with better pay, better benefits, and a more manageable balance between his work and home lives.

Drew McGowan also left nonprofit management behind, as the former director of the Washington regional office of Kaboom, a national organization that constructs playgrounds in low-income areas. He says he misses the “day-to-day, roll-up-your-sleeves, get-it-done-alongside-the-community attitude.” But, now, as an account supervisor at the public-relations company Ketchum, in San Francisco, he enjoys being able to provide some much-needed exposure to nonprofit accomplishments.

“A lot of people think the media is only interested in bad news, since that’s what you most often see covered,” Mr. McGowan says. “But when you have a positive story to tell, like building a playground in one day with all volunteers, the media wants to tell that story as well. That’s why I chose PR as a career. The media isn’t our enemy. We’re just not yelling loud enough about the good news.”

Retention Tools

But while many former executives have gone on to do positive things for the nonprofit field, they have still left empty chairs at the charities they used to head. To help retain nonprofit executives, the nonprofit world needs to create support mechanisms to help alleviate burnout, such as managerial coaching, peer networks, and sabbatical programs, says Tim Wolfred, director of executive leadership at CompassPoint.

For instance, he notes, his organization just completed a yearlong pilot of its Executive Coaching Program, sponsored by the Goldman Fund, in San Francisco, in which 25 executive directors who have been on the job for three years or less receive 40 hours of coaching. The program helps leaders identify their strengths and develop new ways to approach their jobs using those strengths. CompassPoint is also working on creating peer-support groups for executive directors, as well as a sabbatical program, which will provide leave-of-absence funds for executives who have been on the job seven years or more.

Mr. Holcomb says he thinks such offerings would do a lot to help keep leaders like him from moving on. “For me, the stress of the position became so great that perhaps had I been able to take a sabbatical, I might have stayed in the field,” he says. “But I couldn’t have afforded to do it on my own.”

Taking Stock

But until such salves are available nationwide, it is likely that nonprofit-leadership turnover will continue at a fast pace. In the meantime, those who have left the nonprofit field offer some advice to others who are considering making a similar move.

Nancy Axelrod, formerly the founding chief executive of the National Center for Nonprofit Boards (now called BoardSource), is currently an independent consultant at NonProfit Leadership Services, in Washington, where she offers fund-raising, leadership, and strategic-planning consulting to charities. She encourages restless nonprofit leaders to think very hard about the reasons they want to leave, and whether those reasons can be eliminated.

Charity executives who love their jobs, but are just completely exhausted, should talk to their boards, she says: “They may not know how tired you are and may wish to help you create a plan to renew and ultimately retain you.” Even those nonprofit leaders who ultimately decide that their jobs are no longer for them, however, shouldn’t jump without a game plan, but rather should assess their skills and interests. They should figure out not only what they can do well, but what would make them the happiest, Ms. Axelrod says. “Many individuals become nonprofit leaders because they are highly competent at running organizations,” she notes, “but they do not necessarily derive satisfaction in this role.”

Charity leaders who do opt to leave should also consider those they will be leaving behind and make the transition as easy as possible for them, advises Nathan Woodliff-Stanley, who this past July left his position of 10 years as executive director of the Mississippi Center for Nonprofits, in Jackson, to become a Unitarian Universalist minister in Denver. He holds dual graduate degrees from the Yale School of Management and Yale Divinity School and, he says, had always planned to join the ministry.

Mr. Woodliff-Stanley suggests that departing nonprofit leaders give their boards and staffs at least two months’ notice to prepare for their absences and make sure no loose ends are left untied. “The testimony of a really good leader isn’t that they are so indispensable that things fall apart when they leave, but rather that they prepare well enough so that things run just as well or better after they are gone,” he says.

Also, warns Ms. Sacco, no charity leaders should leave their post solely because they think the grass will be greener somewhere else. “The one thing I feared working in nonprofits was being laid off due to lack of budget or loss of a grant,” she says. “The irony is, I have been laid off three times in the business world.”

Those who think they will be leaving stress behind by leaving the nonprofit field should think again, says Mr. Edell: “Corporate executives in the for-profit world stress out and move on just like nonprofit executives do. The content of the stresses may be different, but the stresses are still very much there.”

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