Staying Connected to a Charity’s Mission After a Move Into Management

IN THE TRENCHES

By Tom Chalkley

Jean has always felt called to the front lines of antipoverty work. Her enthusiasm for helping the homeless and hungry led first, a couple of decades ago, to a stint in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a group that helps people in poor neighborhoods. Progressing through a series of increasingly responsible jobs with soup kitchens, food banks, and international-development groups, Jean learned the nuts and bolts of nonprofit administration and developed a knack for organizing workers. Ultimately, she went overseas, where she directed a charity that helped children with disabilities, many of whom had been abandoned by their parents. “Obviously, it was really difficult, especially working with homeless children, but I really loved it,” says Jean, who requested that her last name be withheld to protect her current job.

When a family crisis brought her back to the United States, Jean decided to apply her skills and knowledge at a new level. Her current job, at a foundation in Manhattan consists mainly of fund raising and administrative tasks. “I know it’s important and I know it’s needed,” she says. “It’s challenging and great in some ways, but I’m not seeing firsthand what we’re doing.” Increasingly, she says, she finds herself yearning for the rewards of her earlier career.

To varying degrees, many workers in the nonprofit world can identify with Jean’s situation. People who pursue careers in charity or social change often do so because they feel strongly about particular causes or issues, or because they thrive on daily risk and challenge. The catch is, if they are good at what they do, these talented, passionate people may get promoted into roles away from the very sources of their motivation.

“It’s a very common situation,” says Sandy Gill, director of Northwest Nonprofit Resources, a consulting group in Spokane, Wash. “Especially in small organizations, that’s how leadership typically evolves. Employees do their work so well that when the organization needs a leader, often they get chosen — without necessarily having all the tools to serve in that broader leadership capacity.”

Weighing Options

Like others in similar straits, Jean has several options. She could quit her job and look for something better suited to her temperament. She could find ways to make her current work more satisfying. Or she could learn to suppress her personal needs and labor on, reminding herself that the work she does will, somewhere down the line, improve the lives of poor people.

Managers and counselors who deal with issues of motivation and morale warn that the last approach, taken too far, can have negative effects on both employees and their organizations, including ill health, friction with co-workers, and high staff turnover.

Patricia Novick, a holistic-health counselor in Chicago, frequently aids nonprofit executives — mostly working in small, community-based organizations — who find themselves running out of steam in middle age. It is rarely a question of their professional commitment: Most of Ms. Novick’s clients seek her advice because of complaints about health, domestic life, or a feeling of personal emptiness or dissatisfaction, even though they believe in their work and wouldn’t dream of quitting. Many, she says, talk to her about what they used to do before taking on executive duties. “It partly has to do with people coming to a particular age when they begin to ask questions about spiritual issues,” she says. “They’ve moved from the early quest for justice into administrative positions. The question of ‘What does this all mean? ‘ occurs at a certain stage in the life cycle.”

What is most lacking in their lives, she says, is the joy they used to derive from their work — not just from doing good deeds, but from camaraderie and creativity. Somehow, whether through their work or around the edges of it, they need to rediscover pleasure and excitement. Male clients, in particular, often resist her admonitions to enjoy life, Ms. Novick says. “They say it’s narcissistic. I tell them, ‘If you don’t fill up the reservoir, you don’t have it to give.’ That’s the only way they accept it.”

Consistently, Ms. Novick says, she finds that very small adjustments in her clients’ lives — even things as simple as taking a few hours a week to enjoy sports or music — can make a big difference in how they perform at work.

Maintaining Passion

While Ms. Novick’s holistic-health approach may seem like a revelation to her clients, some charity managers have employed similar strategies for many years. Gary Steinberg maintains his own passion for nonprofit work by immersing himself — literally — in his organization’s issue. Mr. Steinberg, who works for Clean Water Action, a national environmental group, originally got involved in anti-pollution campaigns as an offshoot of his love for whitewater kayaking, and he still kayaks whenever he can.

The organization works to keep all of its employees’ morale up by encouraging strong social bonds among its workers and its environmentalist allies. Parties and impromptu “staff nights” — which may involve a trip to a restaurant, or combining envelope-stuffing tasks with pizza — punctuate the hectic work cycle. “It’s programmed-in. It’s a very conscious effort,” says Mr. Steinberg, who in addition to supervising the group’s programs in California and Colorado also coordinates the group’s door-to-door canvassing operations nationwide. “It takes an effort to plan celebrations, but if you never stop and celebrate your victories, even your partial victories, that’s a problem.”

The social activities aren’t simply parties, but opportunities for staff members to mingle across organizational lines and feel connected to the group’s mission. Interactions of this kind are part of the workday as well. At Clean Water Action’s Washington D.C. office, members of the national program staff share close quarters with local organizers and with the group’s canvassers, who communicate directly with the public. Senior staff members are expected to provide policy briefings to the canvassers and, several times a year, to join them in door-to-door advocacy in suburban neighborhoods.

By fostering a lively work environment and requiring tasks that bring managers closer to the front lines, Clean Water Action has been able to maintain a very stable senior staff. Mr. Steinberg, for example, has been with the organization since 1977. The organization’s executive director, David Zwick, founded the group in 1972.

Seeking Camaraderie

Many nonprofit professionals, however, must look outside their own groups to find the kind of camaraderie and peer support that Clean Water Action cultivates in-house. On this front, a number of local “umbrella” groups and professional networks sponsor social opportunities for their members.

Those at the very top of a charity’s hierarchy may be most in need of activities that reconnect them to their passion for nonprofit work. “Executive directors have a lonely position. It can be very isolating,” says Florence Macdaniel, executive director of the Nonprofit Resource Center of Texas, in San Antonio, which offers management-support services to charities. “A lot of times you can’t confide your issues with your board or your staff.” To provide an outlet for such concerns, the center sponsors a monthly breakfast for executive directors from all sorts of charities, regardless of size, budget, or mission, which she says participants have told her helps break down their feelings of isolation.

Without strategies for energizing senior employees, the nonprofit field as a whole can expect a high rate of staff turnover, says Ms. Macdaniel. A number of surveys, including one conducted by the Bay Area nonprofit management-support organization CompassPoint, indicate that many people who hold executive-director posts do not intend to lead charities again after they leave their current jobs.

Jean, the foundation employee in New York, says that breaking out of her feeling of isolation has helped her grapple with her personal frustration over moving away from frontline work — at least, for now.

Seeking a supportive network, Jean turned to her old colleagues from the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, many of whom have followed their own paths into the hierarchy of the nonprofit world. According to Kathleen Haser, director of the corps’ eastern division, in Baltimore, fellow corps alumni make an ideal support group for one another because, as volunteers, they lived together (in church-sponsored group homes) and trained together. Most importantly, corps members shared a set of values, which Ms. Haser states as “simple lifestyle, community, spirituality, and working for social justice.”

To keep her hand in direct antipoverty work, the source of her motivation and passion, Jean has volunteered with a number of grass-roots charities in Manhattan, including relief services following the September 11 terrorist attacks. While the work is gratifying, she says, “I feel like it’s not enough for me personally.”

Ultimately, she says, she may decide to move on. She contemplates a possible next stage for her career: building a new antipoverty organization from the ground up, applying all she has learned over the past 20 years — including some ideas for keeping senior staff members energized.

“I’d definitely make an explicit effort to integrate all staff,” she says. She would hold biannual staff retreats, she says, and frequently bring in speakers to discuss the issues her group is working on. “In general,” she says, “I hope that I would always be able to bring people back to the reason why we are doing what we do: to help others.”

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