May 5, 2013 | Read Time: 8 minutes
On his first day in a leadership program, Michael Hill found himself both shaken and stirred.
As he and other participants in the American Express NGen Fellows Program sat in a circle, an instructor stared at them for four minutes without saying a word. Then she asked shocked participants what they expected from the program.
“She told us she wasn’t going to spoon-feed us a program and that there would be no neatly bound syllabus to carry around telling us where to go and what to do,” says Mr. Hill, 39, senior vice president for external affairs at United Cerebral Palsy. “For me, that mirrored what really happens in leadership—there’s no road map.”
The approach forced the program’s 12 fellows to bond quickly as they pondered leadership case studies.
It also helped him move up the career ladder, he says: In early June, Mr. Hill will become chief executive of Youth for Understanding USA, an international student-exchange group.
His experience with NGen, a project of Independent Sector and the American Express Foundation, for people under 40, represents a sweeping change in nonprofit-leadership education.
A new generation of such programs is designed to get prospective executives out of their comfort zones, show them how to work together to solve the problems nonprofit officials encounter every day, and form a tight network of leaders who can rely on one another as they move forward in their careers.
“The recession has made everyone reconsider what leadership means,” says Mr. Hill. “The cookie-cutter approaches to skills building really don’t work well enough anymore when you’re trying to solve problems that affect a wide range of people.”
No Lone Heroes
The new breed of leadership programs places a premium on teaching executives to build coalitions with people who work on their causes or in other parts of the nonprofit world. The model of the lone heroic leader, once associated with charity work, is all but dead, experts say. That’s in part because many nonprofit officials have come to realize that social problems are so interconnected, the only way to solve them is to bring everyone together.
“No one issue stands alone anymore,” says Akaya Windwood, president of the Rockwood Leadership Institute, an organization that trains many nonprofit executives. “People once used silos to identify a particular area of work. But the days are numbered for those who try to lead within them, if they’re not over already.”
In the past, a lack of emphasis on collaborative leadership “was one of the shortcomings in these programs,” says Simon Greer, president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, which has made more than $12-million in grants to leadership programs in the past five years. (See Page CE-5.)
“Individuals used to have great experiences learning about leadership and then return to a staff that didn’t want to hear about them,” says Mr. Greer. “We’re seeing more emphasis on leadership teams that can create change in an organization.”
But that doesn’t mean grant makers care so much about grooming leaders to move up in their own organizations.
“Keeping people where they are isn’t a priority for us,” says Tim McClimon, president of the American Express Foundation, which since 2006 has supported 10,000 people worldwide as they have gone through its leadership programs, including NGen and a separate and larger leadership academy. “It’s more important to us to keep emerging leaders in the nonprofit field.”
Sharing Power
Anxieties over an expected mass exodus of baby-boomer CEOs have fueled the growth of leadership programs in the past few years.
Two in three nonprofit executives anticipate leaving their jobs by 2016, according to a 2011 report by CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, a consulting group that focuses on leadership.
What’s more, a Bridgespan study from that same year found that nearly two in three groups report that they lack succession plans.
Some foundations have stepped up their support for training efforts in part because of the challenges faced by the organizations they support.
“We’ve had more and more foundations approach us for help because they see a looming leadership-deficit problem among their grantees,” says Kirk Kramer, a partner at the Bridgespan Group.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, Cummings, the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have each either created programs or made grants to support leadership training that emphasizes collaboration.
They have led the charge away from more traditional curricula that emphasize traditional management skills, like overseeing finances or fundraising.
Instead, the new leadership programs “help people hone the softer skills, like collaboration and power sharing,” says Kathleen Enright, executive director of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, a coalition of foundations.
Because leadership training is often one of the first budget items that charities cut in hard times, foundations often ease the crunch by offering grantees money for training, she adds.
Intense but Uplifting
One of the most prominent nonprofit groups that offers leadership guidance is the Rockwood Leadership Institute, which has trained more than 5,000 leaders and aspiring leaders since 2000, when it was founded by two environmental-movement veterans seeking to curb the high rate of burnout among people like them.
Its fellowship programs, held on bucolic campuses in California, New York, and Virginia, are almost all underwritten by a handful of grant makers, including the Haas Jr. fund and the Open Society Foundations.
Rockwood runs fellowships and training for leaders in specialized fields, such as arts and culture, and for gay and lesbian groups. (See Page CE-6.) Fellowships can last anywhere from five days to nine months and maintain a focus on clearly communicating one’s vision, maintaining work-life balance, and teaching people how to avoid “trigger points” that set them off emotionally.
Despite the programs’ intensity, Rockwood hopes that the experience provides some uplift for stressed-out leaders. “If people can see the work of changing the world as joyous and inspiring, to the point where they stay in it for the long haul, we will have done our job,” says Ms. Windwood.
Fees for fellowships that cost $1,000 per person are often whittled down to around $100 with the help of grants and money from participants’ organizations. A separate five-day program, a retreat called the Art of Leadership, can cost several thousand dollars, but Rockwood offers some organizations a break based on their finances.
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a small advocacy group in Oakland, Calif., sends one to three of its staff members to Rockwood training each year. The sliding scale “allows us to budget for that,” says Jakada Imani, 41, the Baker Center’s executive director.
The program is designed to bring together leaders from a wide range of nonprofit backgrounds so they can learn the qualities essential to effective leadership, including developing an understanding of how one’s leadership affects other people.
Mr. Imani lauds Rockwood for making sure its programs “are rooted in the real work we do and how we can apply what we learn to our context.” When he was named to lead his organization four years ago, he says, he “immediately signed up for another Rockwood session.”
Pilot Programs
Another major player in the field, the Center for Creative Leadership, in Greensboro, N.C., has been hired by numerous foundations, including American Express and Robert Wood Johnson, to create new programs. The organization trains about 20,000 people each year.
Based on the center’s research, Robert Wood Johnson formed two pilot programs last year that stress the need for nonprofit executives from different organizations and different types of charities to learn to work together. One of them gathers people who already work in health coalitions to help them become stronger leaders. A second program aims to teach participants how to work with people in other fields, such as business and government.
One of the coalition-building program’s fellows, Bruce Hathaway, 43, who runs health programs at the YMCA of the USA, has also been running a health-care coalition in Toledo, Ohio, that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation supports. He took on the fellowship to learn how to bring people together to help fight chronic conditions, such as obesity.
He says he valued the advice he got about including input from people in business and government.
“Nonprofits too often run in small circles,” he says.
Testing Ideas
Officials at Robert Wood Johnson say that they will assess how the 50 people who attended the coalition program fared before making another commitment this year.
“We’re looking at how successful these people will be once they head back to their fields,” says Robin Mockenhaupt, chief of staff at Robert Wood Johnson. “Are they more self-aware? Are they better as leaders at pulling all the elements together?”
That effort is emblematic of how grant makers are trying to test which leadership ideas work and which don’t, some experts say. Making more of an impact on large social problems is crucial to how foundations now view leadership programs—and is becoming more of a determining factor in whether they will support them. The newer programs have different goals than more traditional ones, says Mr. Kramer, of Bridgespan.
Much of the coalition-building work now found in some leadership training programs may have more to do with creating social change than building up an individual’s skills, he says. Despite that, the new emphasis on getting people to lead together may make them more effective executives. “Those programs are grounded in real-life work and situations,” Mr. Kramer says. “Maybe that’s a better way to drive leadership development.”
