Many Nonprofit Leaders Don’t Ever Want the Top Job Again, Survey Finds

Most people who lead charities are very satisfied with their work — but the majority

never want to do it again, because of the stress of dealing with finances, personnel, and other issues, according to results of a new survey.

The study of more than 1,000 nonprofit executives was conducted by CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, a nonprofit-management consulting group in San Francisco. The directors who participated in the survey work for charities in the Bay Area, central California, Dallas, Hawaii, and Washington, D.C., and were chosen to provide a representative sample of groups operating across the country.

The survey found that most executives are white, female, well-educated baby boomers who haven’t been on the job more than four years and have never previously headed a charity.

Eighty-five percent of respondents rated their jobs 4 or 5 on a scale on which 5 indicated the highest degree of satisfaction. Executives surveyed said they felt they had the skills to handle their roles: 79 percent rated their professional skills at 4 or 5. A nonprofit group’s mission — more so than salary, benefits, or even an organization’s reputation — was most influential in an executive director’s decision to take his or her job, the study found.

Slightly more than two-thirds of the executives said they anticipated staying in their jobs for another three years or more.

Most executives had previous management experience in either business or government, but two-thirds of them had never headed a nonprofit group before their current jobs. Sixty-four percent were recruited from outside their organizations. (This number, the report acknowledges, may include organization founders, some of whom may have counted themselves as coming from business, government, or elsewhere.)

For many of the chief executives, the first such assignment may also be the last — fewer than half report that they intend to take on another top job at a nonprofit group. And when they leave, their organizations will probably have to look outside for a replacement: 53 percent of current executive directors surveyed say they have not identified a potential successor among their co-workers.

Timothy Wolfred, CompassPoint’s director of leadership services and one of the researchers, said he was surprised by how many nonprofit heads were recruited from outside — and how few of them saw a successor among their colleagues. “Organizations need to be cultivating people within their organizations for leadership, and the sector needs to cultivate people for leadership,” he said. “There’s no preparation for these people and no training when they get there. They’re learning on the job.”

And often, they’re learning the hard way. “Executive directors are hard to find. People who stay a long time are rare,” said Hedy Helsell, executive director of the Center for Nonprofit Management, a consulting organization in Dallas that helped distribute surveys for the study. “The hardest job in the world is running a small nonprofit, harder than running a small business.” In addition to managing with limited resources, Ms. Helsell says, a charity head must please his or her board, “while many small businesses are truly working for themselves.”

Among the survey’s other findings:

• The executives’ average age is 49, with half of them in their 50s and 60s. (Only 18 percent are younger than 40.)
• Fifty-eight percent of organizations’ heads hold advanced degrees, most of them in program-related fields like social work or education; only 9 percent of respondents with advanced degrees hold them in business fields.
• Seventy-five percent identified themselves as “European/white,” though some regions are more diverse than others. For example, 9 percent of respondents nationwide are black, but nearly 23 percent of executives in Washington are black.

Women significantly outnumber men as the heads of nonprofit groups, the study found — 62 percent are female. Women were far more likely to head small organizations — which suggests, the report said, that “women have been more likely to found nonprofits.” For example, females head 69 percent of groups with a budget of $100,000 or less. But men are more likely to lead large organizations and, on average, are paid more for the same jobs. Groups with a $5-million budget or more have the largest discrepancies, and the gaps are substantial. For instance, at groups with budgets between $5-million and $10-million, woman executives make an average of $82,314 a year, while their male counterparts make $98,739.

Departures of Leaders

The age and career plans of current nonprofit leaders foreshadow an exodus of chief executives, according to the report. One-third plan to leave within the next two years. Thirty percent of respondents said they intend to retire from their current post, and taken together with the finding that fewer than half plan to take another executive director job in the future, “we can anticipate losing at least 57 percent of the respondents from the candidate pool,” the report states.

However, the loss of so many leaders may not necessarily mean that the nonprofit world is facing a brain drain. Fifty-nine percent of respondents say that they expect their next job will be at a charity. Among the popular choices of a next job: to be a nonprofit consultant or program director.

And a new generation of nonprofit workers shows signs of wanting to become the next leaders. The report includes results from a new survey by the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, a Bay Area group that serves nonprofit workers under age 35. The network’s survey of 300 young nonprofit employees found that 47 percent aspire to become executive directors.

Help With Trustees

The executive directors surveyed had some specific ideas about the kinds of support that could help them stay on the job. After “more money” (which 36 percent of CompassPoint respondents mentioned), help with board development was cited by 23 percent, while more staff members to help with management and administration tasks was requested by 21 percent of respondents.

Boards play a significant role in determining an executive director’s job satisfaction, according to the study. Sixty-seven percent of the respondents rated their boards as very or somewhat supportive, though they were not as positive when asked to rank their boards’ performance in aiding them with specific tasks, such as fund raising, strategic planning, and financial oversight.

For training and support, most respondents reported that they depended more on peers and co-workers — and even spouses or partners — than on formal coaching and mentorship. Executive coaching and college-based training ranked lowest among sources of information available to managers of nonprofit groups.

Limited time and money may play a role in keeping directors from formal training, suggests CompassPoint’s research manager, Jeanne Peters, the co-author of the study with Mr. Wolfred. “If you’re an executive director at a nonprofit making $40,000 a year and you’re working 80 hours a week,” she says, “then you’ve got no time for an academic program.”

In order for training to be useful, says Jan Garrett, a first-time executive director who has headed the Center for Independent Living, in Berkeley, Calif., for two years, “it’s got to be based on the organization itself” rather than just being a generic management course. More helpful to most time-pressed charity leaders, she suggests, would be a “short support group with other executive directors.” Also helpful to many of her peers, she says, would be advice on formulating a strategic plan, “and how to find a consultant you can really afford.”

Advice for Donors

The report made several recommendations to grant makers who are interested in helping retain charity leaders. It urged that such donors show a willingness to pay for operating costs — especially those that allow an executive director to hire administrative help — and to make multiple-year grants, thereby alleviating some of the constant pressure executives face in raising funds. The report also recommends that donors pay for professional development and sabbaticals.

To board members, the report suggests actively monitoring executive job satisfaction, recruiting board members to complement the strengths of the executive director, discussing a plan for succession in the leadership role, and ensuring equality in hiring and compensation.

Board members can support their organization’s leader by simply knowing what his or her job entails, so that they can make more reasonable demands on him or her, says Lisa Breen Strickland, executive director of the Support Network for Battered Women in Mountain View, Calif. “Simply ask” what a charity leader does day to day, she advises. “Most executive directors will tell you.”

Unlike many of the leaders in the study, Ms. Breen Strickland has served in the role more than once: She has been at her current job for three and a half years, following a year and a half as the head of a smaller group, which also aided domestic-violence survivors. She’s learned that “the more hats you have to wear, the more stress you have,” she says. “At my last executive director job, I was the fund raiser, the personnel director — and then I also saw clients. Now I have fewer hats — they’re bigger, but they’re fewer.”

At the Support Network, Ms. Breen Strickland oversees a budget of $2.1-million and a full-time staff of 32. She says that it’s important for donors to adequately provide for staff members at the charities they support. “I got an assistant a year and half ago and it made my job so much easier,” she says. “You wouldn’t let someone run a $2-million corporation without an assistant.”

André V. Chapman, chief executive of the 120-employee, $6.8-million-budget Unity Care Group, which runs programs for troubled youths in Northern California, shares Ms. Breen Strickland’s concerns.

“Donors need to understand that you can’t pay for a service and not expect there to be quality staff performing that service,” says Mr. Chapman, who started Unity Care after a stint as vice-president of an information technology company. Nonprofit organizations, he says, tend to be “bottom-heavy on the service side,” offering plenty of programs, but “they don’t have the personnel to manage them.” And the burden for this structure, he says, is carried on the back of the executive director.

Above all, Ms. Breen Strickland says, donors and trustees should know why a group’s leader chose the job, and what motivates him or her. Leading a charity, she says, is “all-consuming” and requires a passion for a group’s mission. “And it’s hard to maintain that passion for a really long time.”

CompassPoint was aided in distributing surveys for the study by the Center for Nonprofit Management, the Meyer Foundation in Washington, the Hawaii Community Foundation in Honolulu, and the Nonprofit Advancement Center in Fresno, Calif.

“Daring to Lead: Nonprofit Executive Directors and Their Work Experience” can be ordered for $15 plus shipping and handling from CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, 706 Mission Street, Fifth Floor, San Francisco, Calif., 94103; http://www.compasspoint.org. A summary of the findings is available on the organization’s Web site.