Education Effort Helps New Leaders Take Over From Charity Founders

David J. Dumais took over as his organization’s executive director two years ago, in the aftermath of a sudden tragedy: The charity’s founder, Toby Chuah Feinson, was killed in a traffic accident.

Mr. Dumais, of GroupWorks for Education, in Brooklyn, N.Y., which brings mental-health therapists into city schools to work with students and personnel, had to shoulder not only his own grief at the loss of his friend and colleague but also that of the organization for which he had served as senior facilitator.

“It was like a wound that was everywhere,” he says.

And, with no time to prepare for his new role, he had to keep Ms. Feinson’s work moving forward in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s.

“I didn’t even have her computer passwords,” he says of his former boss, whom he calls a “kind of a one-woman band” in the way she ran the organization. After her death, he says, he learned that she had recently told the board about her plans to step aside from the executive role, but she had never alerted Mr. Dumais to this possibility.

The board, which included Ms. Feinson’s husband, was “a founder’s board,” says Mr. Dumais. “They were really good at saying, ‘Great idea. Go do that.’ But they had no experience at really taking on responsibility for running the organization.”

Also, the group, then operating on a $350,000 budget, was “running out of money,” he says, and desperately needed to move to cheaper office space.

He felt, he says, “extraordinarily alone” in his predicament—until, while shopping for a new headquarters, he learned about a new program at the New School designed to guide executives who had followed founders and other longtime leaders of nonprofit groups into their organizations’ top jobs.

As a participant in the Tenenbaum Leadership Initiative: Leading After the Legacy, the guidance he received from his classmates, instructors, and assigned coach helped him “right the ship,” he says. GroupWorks’s board now includes four new members and has seen the departure of some previous ones. The group’s budget expanded a bit this year, he says, and he has made progress in generating new revenue via partnerships with schools.

“Oh, my God, it was so nice to have a sane set of voices to listen to,” Mr. Dumais says.

‘An Emerging Challenge’

Although few new executives come to their jobs under the extreme circumstances that Mr. Dumais did, many are finding themselves taking the helm under the shadow of their organizations’ founders or longtime leaders. As the baby boomers who created charities in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s step aside, many senior roles will need to be filled, say nonprofit-management experts. (A study last year by the Bridgespan Group found that senior-level jobs at nonprofit groups nationwide are opening up at a faster clip than Bridgespan predicted in a 2006 study, when it suggested 640,000 senior nonprofit managers would be needed by 2016.)

“We realized we were seeing only the tip of an emerging challenge” for nonprofit organizations, says Mark Lipton, who runs the Tenenbaum program at Milano the New School for Management and Urban Policy. And, he says, “in our understanding, nobody in the country was touching this issue.”

In the Shadow

The recession, he says, may also be pushing some older leaders out more quickly, as some boards seek new ideas to deal with a challenging fund-raising climate. But it also may be giving longtime leaders more clout, allowing them to “almost hold an organization hostage,” says Mr. Lipton, by using their close relationships with certain donors and grant makers as leverage to retain power.

Many new leaders will suffer the loss of institutional memory when their predecessor leaves—or face second-guessing of their decisions, if that person sticks around.

“The predecessors often don’t go away. They put themselves on the board; they write themselves consulting contracts.” says Mr. Lipton. “It is exceedingly hard for them to let go, and I can appreciate their end of it, too. This is like their child, and they can’t walk away from their child.”

In addition, the new executives may need to contend with lingering board and employee loyalties to the predecessor and a resistance to change, he says.

The New School program is supported by a $500,000 gift from the philanthropist Ann G. Tenenbaum and her husband, Thomas Lee, founder of Lee Equity Partners. The gift, she says, came from the couple’s friendship with Fred Hochberg, former dean of Milano the New School for Management and Urban Policy.

Ms. Tenenbaum, who currently serves on eight boards—including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Film Society of Lincoln Center (of which she is chair), and Channel 13/WNET (of which she is vice chair)—says she has often seen charities struggle with leadership problems.

“Sometimes it would be a director not understanding how to interface with the board,” she says. “Sometimes it was structuring fund raising for capital campaigns. There were a couple of different things that annoyed me.”

She feels it’s important for donors and grant makers to support leadership development, and the economic slump has made that need for support more urgent, she says: “Especially today, you’re giving away your dollars that are harder and harder to come by, you want to be sure that you’re supporting an organization that’s viable.”

‘A Crisis of Leadership’

The need for leadership-development programs geared specifically at those who follow “legacy leaders” is growing, says Gilles Mesrobian, who participated in the Tenenbaum program while he served as interim executive director of Abraham House, in New York—which offers services to incarcerated people and their families—following the retirement of its founder.

Mr. Mesrobian, a senior fellow at the Support Center for Nonprofit Management, in New York, has also founded an organization and has repeatedly seved as an interim executive.

“So many of these baby boomers started organizations, and as they sunset, as they retire, they leave a void,” he says. “And yet all of these organizations are still there.”

He sees a “crisis of leadership” if these groups’ new leaders don’t get the support they need. “The responsibilities and the pressures on executive directors are not diminishing, they’re actually getting much greater in an economy like this,” he says. “These support programs are critical; otherwise, the executive director job becomes a dead-end job.”

The Tenenbaum Leadership Initiative, which has served three groups of about 20 participants each (a fourth is slated to begin in September), accepts new executives from organizations within commuting distance of New York, though it has received inquiries from would-be applicants in Atlanta, Chicago, and even Africa, says Mr. Lipton.

Participants meet about one morning a week, every other week for four months. They are subjected to a “360-degree assessment” of their managerial and leadership skills (in which each student’s supervisors, subordinates, and others associates are asked to evaluate him or her), paired with a personal coach, and participate in classes.

The organizers, Mr. Lipton says, seek to diversify the program’s participants not only by gender, race, and ethnicity but also by the size and mission of the groups they represent. “Our theory is, the issues don’t change,” he says. “The issues really are about that succession change.”

The program picks up the tab for participants, though it may need to charge members of future groups, Mr. Lipton says. If it does, organizers worry that they might exclude people from smaller charities. The Tenenbaum Leadership Initiative currently costs the school “about $10,000 per person,” he says, “and we’re eating that.” (Ms. Tenenbaum says she and her husband have no immediate plans to add more support to the program due to the still-shaky economy.)

Mr. Lipton says the program works with its alumni to keep cultivating the network they develop in the classroom, organizing meetups related to lectures and other events.

Building Strength

For many participants, that network can be a valuable means of support. Says Georgia Lerner, who took over as executive director of the Women’s Prison Association two years ago when her boss retired, “I had really been yearning for a group of like-situated colleagues who I could call upon when there were things happening here, or decisions I had to make, things that were bugging me, or exciting, that I couldn’t appropriately discuss with my staff or my board chair.”

Ms. Lerner was promoted to a leadership role at the 165-year-old New York organization just as the recession began to gather steam. She replaced a longtime leader who had built the group from a budget of a few hundred thousand dollars to $8-million during her tenure. In the past couple of years, the organization has struggled with fund raising, resulting in a hiring freeze and some staff cuts.

“I know she had great confidence in me,” says Ms. Lerner of her predecessor, who moved away and is no longer involved in the charity. But, she says, “I had to contend with the big presence, and the huge building she had done of the organization, and feel a little like I’m sort of failing, because of the tough economy and we were hitting tough financial spots as an agency. It felt a little yucky to be the person who was presiding over the downsizing.”

The Tenenbaum program, she says, helped her realize “what I bring in terms of growth.”

Her strength, she believes, is “this desire to articulate and bring into line the reason we’re here with the way that we do things. So there’s consistency between the mission and the how and the environment that we create for clients.”

John K. Sanful, moved into the top job of Career Gear after being with the charity since 2004. He succeeded the group’s founder, who shifted his focus to fund raising for the group.

Mr. Sanful says the Tenenbaum program gave him a greater appreciation for the importance of giving voice to a group’s mission, both inside and outside the organization.

Career Gear helps provide business clothes and job-interview counseling to men who have completed job-training programs. The group, says Mr. Sanful, had long wanted to offer more follow-up help to its clients, including coaching about saving money, taking care of their families, and retaining jobs.

Since his involvement in Tenenbaum, Mr. Sanful has helped his organization pour more resources into these follow-up programs. “We’ve had it in place for a number of years, but I think I’ve been better able to articulate the impact of those programs” to grant makers, says Mr. Sanful, who runs the group on a yearly budget of $650,000 (and between $1- and $1.5-million annually in clothing donations).

Glennda Testone, who took over in November as executive director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Community Center, in New York (following Richard D. Burns, who had held the job for 22 years), says a big takeaway from the Tenenbaum program for her is the importance of embracing the power of the top leader.

In short, she says, she learned “to not be scared. To take risks.”

Taking that advice to heart, this past winter she dusted off a strategic plan for the group that had been completed near the end of her predecessor’s tenure and had sat dormant during the transition and the recession. She presented the plan to her board in March; it was accepted, and the organization is now moving forward to begin implementation next month. The plan will shift the organization’s focus more intensively on youths and families.

“It’s quite early in my tenure to do that,” she says, “But we needed to put a stake in the ground.”