Managers Who Have Moved From Businesses to Charities Tell How They Navigated the Differences

JOB MARKET

By Jeffrey Klineman

She seemed to be the perfect candidate. A community-theater performer in her youth, she had earned a master’s in business administration and gone on to a responsible, lucrative position in the travel-card industry. (Travel cards are credit cards that are used at gas stations and similar businesses.) Now, she wanted to come back to the arts, and Richard M. King, president of Kittleman and Associates, a recruiter in Chicago that specializes in nonprofit clients, had found a great fit. A financially struggling community theater needed a president, and the executive soon had the job.

She didn’t last long. “She solved their financial problems in about six months,” Mr. King recalls. “At the same time, the artistic director had a hard time relating to her. She was from industry, sure, but she wasn’t from the theater industry. The board was happy with her dollars-and-cents knowledge, but half the artistic staff left.”

The theater president subsequently returned to the business world, Mr. King says, where she’s happier.

Her story represents a worst-case scenario for those corporate employees who want to cross over into the nonprofit field. While the skills sometimes translate, say those who have made the journey, attitudes and motivations might not.

Former corporate employees often have to change their work styles when they go to work for nonprofit organizations. They need to adapt to a new work culture and limited resources, and learn how to raise funds. While career changers may expect to make less money at charities than at businesses, they may be surprised to discover that, despite their expectations, nonprofit jobs can demand long hours just like corporate positions. They may also discover, however, that contributing to a charity’s mission is a great source of satisfaction.

“I’m still working 12 hours a day, but it’s a totally different kind of time. It’s very rewarding,” says Sally M. Davis, chief executive officer of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Indiana, in Indianapolis, who came to her current job after managing corporate collaborations for the drug company Eli Lilly.

Mr. King estimates that one in eight of the candidates he places have come from the corporate world. “The acceptance by nonprofits of business professionals is a lot better than it used to be, but it’s not where you can do the transition easily,” says Mr. King, who has written a book on those transitions, From Making a Profit to Making a Difference (Planning Communications, 2000, $16.95). “A lot of nonprofits are still skeptical about the motivations of business professionals moving into their ranks.”

Understanding from the start that there is a difference between the two fields is one of the keys to gaining acceptance, but so is the ability to adapt on the fly, says Hildy Gottlieb, a nonprofit organizational consultant in Tucson. “You need to ask the questions, ‘Is it going to be different?’ and ‘How is it going to be different?’” she says. “How do I maybe have to change my thinking? There’s a very paternalistic feel from the business world to the nonprofit world, that they’re going to go help their kid brother. Once they get into it, if they’re smart, they say, ‘Oh my goodness, I’d better learn.’”

Mission and Measuring Success

One difference between the business world and nonprofit work, say many who have made the shift, is how success is measured.

“The hardest thing is the notion of being a mission-driven operation rather than profit-driven,” says Gideon Rosenblatt, who left Microsoft nearly two years ago to become executive director of OneNorthwest, a nonprofit organization in Seattle that supplies software and technology consulting to environmental groups. In the business world, he says success is measured in dollars earned. But charities don’t measure their successes in that clear-cut way, he notes, and thus have a more difficult time discerning the impact of their work.

Although charities are under pressure from donors and grant makers to show results for their work, performance measurement is a new concept in the nonprofit world — and many organizations haven’t learned to use the information they gather. A survey of 900 nonprofit groups released last October by Independent Sector, a Washington group that represents foundations and charities, shows that close to one-third do not know how to apply their performance data.

Things also move slower at charities, according to career changers. “In the for-profit world, business processes are already in place, and they are very standardized,” says Joan Doyle, associate director of major gifts at the University of Maryland Medical System Foundation, in Baltimore, and a former consumer-relations director for Procter & Gamble. “In nonprofits, things may not be as organized. I think that it is easy for someone who is used to the pace of a for-profit to at first become easily frustrated by the way things are done in some nonprofit organizations. The pace is slower.”

Those obstacles force creativity, according to Ms. Davis, of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Indiana. Her organization, she says, will chart the results of its work by devising its own system of measurements — or, in business parlance, “metrics.”

“We’re going to have a wall of metrics: kids served, agency partnerships, flexibility, even down to how often we are using information technology,” Ms. Davis says. “But the employees have come up with their own metrics, their own goals, and how to meet them.”

Letting her employees come up with their own measure of success was important, she says, because she believes that many nonprofit workers know their organizations well and are motivated more by their desire to fulfill an organizational mission than by a higher salary.

Varied Resources

Charities, dependent on the generosity of donors, often find themselves short on operating funds and other resources, presenting another challenge for career changers. “Somebody who is going into the nonprofit setting needs to know that they’re going to work with the copy machine that sticks, and that the mouse might have duct tape on it,” Ms. Gottlieb says.

Ms. Davis says she is learning to make do with the resources and staff she has. “The major difference is the type of people you’re working with,” she says. “My staff is from 21 to 74 years old, people with no degrees and multiple degrees. I’m very fast-paced, and corporate America was a natural fit. With not-for-profit, you only move so fast — you’re dealing with donors, with volunteers, with issues that cannot be solved overnight.”

When employees perform well, the lack of resources to reward them can be a source of frustration, says Michael Bivens, president of the National Urban Fellows Program, in New York, which provides education and leadership-training fellowships to people interested in public service. “You have to be more creative in a nonprofit organization, particularly if you don’t have the resources to reward people financially all the time,” says Mr. Bivens, a former executive at both the corporate and foundation divisions of the Coca-Cola Company, in Atlanta. Sometimes, he says, money is what employees want — but other perks may also be desired. “It may be training or development opportunities that they haven’t been able to take advantage of,” he says. “Sometimes it’s as simple as moving people around so that people are able to address their interests and areas in which they want to grow.”

Resource allocation is one challenge, but coming up with those resources can be an even bigger hurdle. While many corporate employees have dealt with budgets before, they have always known where the money for those budgets came from: the corporation. When they make the switch to charity work, however, they find that their plans are often dependent on their ability to come up with the capital themselves, through fund raising.

This can present a new set of pressures. “Asking for money is not something that most people are used to doing,” Mr. Rosenblatt says. “But if you run the organization, and you’re trying to grow it at all, it takes a lot of time and it’s an area of expertise that you have to get.”

The stress of being a charity’s breadwinner can be an unpleasant surprise for former corporate executives who had envisioned nonprofit work as a reprieve from the rat race. “As a fund raiser, I am expected to bring money in the door,” Ms. Doyle says. “If I don’t, that’s a problem. I actually am under more pressure now working for a nonprofit than I was in the corporate environment.”

Mr. Bivens, whose last corporate position was in awarding grants at the Coca-Cola Foundation, quickly realized something when he started to call foundations to ask for money: It’s hard and humbling to be a grant seeker. “I was reaching out and calling people, trying to get their attention, and it was a little harder than it had been before,” he said. “On this side, a lot of the work you have to do is making relationships.”

The Cash Crunch

Although some who leave the business world are moving to nonprofit jobs that offer equal or even greater pay, many career changers leave behind substantial paychecks. A survey released last year by the Urban Institute, an economic and social-policy think tank in Washington, showed that in 1998, the most recent year for which figures were available, nonprofit executive directors were paid a median salary of $42,000 — meaning that half made less and half made more. That figure is lower than the salaries for many midlevel employees at for-profit companies.

Tim Schultz had been a trust director at Norwest/Wells Fargo before he took a position creating a planned-giving department at the United Way of Phoenix. “At the bank, my compensation was about $300,000 a year,” he says. “The United Way was paying about $63,000 a year. But I’d made the decision that I’d done all the ‘go, go go’ stuff.”

He left the United Way in August, he says, but not because of money — he had disagreements with the organization’s management. He is still deciding on the next step in his career, but hasn’t ruled out more charity work. “Salaries are only part of it,” he says. “If people are happy in their position, they’ll take a lower salary.”

Lower pay is not usually a source of dissatisfaction for career changers, says Debra J. Mesch, a professor of public and nonprofit management at Indiana University-Purdue University’s Center on Philanthropy, in Indianapolis. “People are not motivated just by money,” she says. “There are issues of challenging work, good leadership, supportive colleagues, and if those are there, I don’t believe people leave absolutely for the money. You just expect to earn less in the nonprofit field. It applies to that whole motivation and mission idea.”

A search for purpose drove Stephen Zabilski to leave behind the financial rewards he enjoyed in the business world. Mr. Zabilski heads the Phoenix chapter of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, an international charity that provides food, shelter, and other services to the poor — a job he took after leaving his auditor’s position with the international accounting firm KPMG.

“My salary was more than cut in half to come to St. Vincent de Paul,” Mr. Zabilski says. “I’m still learning to deal with it after six years. But you find joy and peace in your life in other ways. My family and I are volunteering at St. Vincent de Paul this evening, and it’s Friday night. We’re going to have a closer experience as a family than we could have had when we did something flashy.”

Many new nonprofit managers echo his observation that charity work offers more opportunities to spend time with their families. Still, personal rewards aside, some warn that the sense of mission can be as all-consuming as any commitment to profit and business excellence.

“In the private sector you have your work life and your home life and your family life,” Ms. Mesch says. “It’s harder to leave your work at work in the nonprofit sector. If you’re dealing with AIDS patients or handicapped individuals, it’s harder to leave your work without taking it with you. It’s not a 9-to-5 job. If someone needs you, you stay and deal with the client that you’re serving.”

Have you made the transition to charities from the business world? What did you find to be the biggest adjustments, and how did you navigate the changes? Tell us about it in the Job Market online forum.