Charities Should Plan Carefully for the Time That a Leader Is Away

Making the most of a sabbatical requires

more than just figuring out what to do during the time off.

To ensure that the experience is a positive one for both the individual and the organization from which he or she is taking leave requires careful thought and planning, say non-profit leaders who have taken sabbaticals.

Among the issues that are important to think about in advance:

Who’s the boss? Perhaps the most obvious — and most important — challenge is determining who should lead the organization while the chief executive officer is away.

When Jim Kielsmeier, president of the National Youth Leadership Council, in St. Paul, took a sabbatical in Somalia in 1993, he hired an acting executive director from outside the council to manage the organization during his absence.

In retrospect, hiring someone from the outside turned out to be a mistake, he says. “People were still waiting for me to come back,” he says, in part because it was difficult for someone new to take charge effectively.

Having learned from the experience, he now says that he would instead tap an existing staff member to take his place, and ask his board of trustees to extend an extra effort to support that person.

That was the approach taken at the Boston charity Jobs for the Future, where the organization’s president, Hilary Pennington, is currently on a sabbatical at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Ms. Pennington says she would not have felt comfortable taking a long leave if she hadn’t been able to rely on Marlene Seltzer, her executive vice president, to serve as acting president in her absence.

For the past five years, Ms. Seltzer has been Ms. Pennington’s right-hand woman at Jobs for the Future. During that time she had already been gradually taking over many day-to-day management tasks, freeing up Ms. Pennington to focus on intellectual leadership of the group and to devote more time to big-picture responsibilities such as strategic planning and fund raising. As a result, having Ms. Seltzer assume her new responsibilities has not felt like a significant change, Ms. Pennington says.

How to stay in touch. Exactly how unreachable should an executive director on sabbatical be?

The extent to which the leader remains in contact with his or her staff members during a sabbatical can vary considerably. Some welcome the notion of talking to staff members periodically. Others seek to set up a virtual firewall of communication and make it difficult, if not impossible, for anyone — either staff members or people from the outside — to track them down.

Frances Kunreuther, former executive director of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, an organization that provides services to lesbian and gay youths in New York, says she leaned toward being less reachable when she took a sabbatical in 1997.

“When I went away, I was really gone,” she says. “That is very different from saying, ‘I am going away for six months, but I am going to call in to the office once a week to see how things are going.’” Doing so, she thought, would be disruptive, interfering with the acting executive director’s authority.

Mr. Kielsmeier of the National Youth Leadership Council says he wishes that he had stayed in less frequent touch with his colleagues during his sabbatical in Somalia. Because he was in regular contact, he often found that staff members would say, “We’ll wait till Jim calls in from Africa to make a decision on that.” While limiting communication during the sabbatical might have made the transition back to work afterward a little harder, he thinks that it would have been better for the organization in the long run. “It would have been less confusing if I had been more out of the picture,” he says.

Making a commitment to return. One of the challenges sabbaticals can pose is that they give non-profit executives time to envision life without the organization — and, in some cases, prompt them to leave.

For Ms. Kunreuther, the hardest moment during her sabbatical came when the chairman of her group’s board of trustees called and said, “We need to talk. We would love for you to come back, but if you are not going to come back, we need to know.” That prompted Ms. Kunreuther to sit down and ask herself, “Gee, what am I going to do now?”

As it turned out, Ms. Kunreuther decided that it was the right time for her to leave the organization and do something new. After her sabbatical ended, she took a position at the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Hauser Center on Nonprofit Organizations.

Peter Frumkin, a colleague of Ms. Kunreuther’s at the Hauser Center, says it is important for boards of trustees and executive directors to communicate clearly with each other about their expectations. Will the executive director return and pledge to stay a certain period of time after his or her sabbatical is over? All too often, he says, many non-profit boards and executive directors don’t like to discuss those touchy issues, and even more rarely do they put them in writing.

Mr. Frumkin suggests that while a formal contract may not be necessary, it is still important for board members to have a conversation about how charitable resources are being used if the sabbatical is a paid one.

“If a social-service agency gives an executive director a year’s paid sabbatical and the person does not come back, they are still subsidizing the charitable field if the person goes to work for another non-profit,” he notes. “But if the person goes to work in the business sector or somewhere else, how do you justify the charitable use of that money?”