Strategies for Handling Charity Leaders Who Can’t Give Up Control

IN THE TRENCHES

By Tom Chalkley

Carol was hired two years ago to serve as the first executive director of a youth-development organization. The founder, who served as the group’s de facto leader, was a volunteer who had hired several old friends as key staff members. Carol (who asked not to be identified by her full name) was recruited because the organization had grown very rapidly and its needs were a strain on its current staff. As she interviewed employees, Carol soon discovered troubling patterns: The group suffered from high staff turnover, employees complained of haphazard job assignments, and decisions were made on an ad hoc, crisis-to-crisis basis, without long-term planning.

The root of the problem was that the founder micromanaged all of the organization’s business. “There was an undercurrent of tension from employees not knowing what the next day would be like,” Carol says. “Because it hadn’t evolved into a more traditional structure, it was still managed like an entrepreneurial start-up.” Carol resigned after a year of trying, unsuccessfully, to institute standard policies and procedures.

Of all the ills that can befall nonprofit groups, one of the most common and disabling is commonly called “founder’s syndrome,” or “founderitis.” Although the terms are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, they refer to a serious condition that arises when organization founders refuse to recognize their groups’ need for new leadership or new approaches. Typically, the founders (or comparable longstanding leaders) cling to their positions of power, unwilling to face the challenges of change or growth and convinced that the organization cannot carry on without them. If unchecked, this situation can alienate staff and board members and stunt a group’s ability to adapt to new conditions. At worst, it can lead to internal conflicts that are destructive and even fatal to the afflicted organization. And it can happen to any group — from tiny neighborhood associations to vast charitable institutions.

A Mismatch of Skills and Needs

The problem of clinging founders is, at its core, a personnel issue, says Bob Orser, an organizational consultant for nonprofit organizations, in Napa, Calif. “A lot of founders tend to be control freaks,” he says. “A founder is usually a person who is extremely mission-driven. The problem is that the founder often has a set of skills and attitudes that work for the founding part, but as the organization gets larger, it needs new skills and attitudes.” A maturing organization reaches a point where it requires a more formal structure, a larger staff, or other changes that visionary-style leaders often find boring, distasteful, or just too difficult, he says. The mismatch between the leader’s talents and the group’s needs eventually leads to a crisis. “That’s often when the founder leaves, or gets thrown out,” Mr. Orser says.

Mr. Orser’s analysis is echoed by Susan Katz Froning, head of Nonprofit Enterprise at Work, a management-consulting group in Ann Arbor, Mich. “It’s not typically a mission-based problem,” Ms. Froning says. “Nobody’s fighting over the mission, but over how to implement it.”

Sometimes, such conflicts can escalate into bitter conclusions, with serious and lasting repercussions for the founders and their charities. A health organization in Virginia faced serious problems when it absorbed two smaller groups after a merger, including one with a strong-willed founder who turned down an offer to lead the new, larger charity. Instead, Liz (who asked that her last name be withheld) was hired as executive director, and she recalls how the new group struggled to get organized and cope with a newly expanded case load. When the founder balked at the new procedures and structures that the board and staff members had devised and found her role changed, she resigned. During the months spent dealing with the founder’s complaints, however, the group’s case backlog worsened, and its relationships with clients, volunteers, and trustees suffered, Liz says.

While Ms. Froning has observed “founderitis” symptoms at many of the charities her organization aids, she says that founders are not always entirely at fault in such situations. Passive board members, she says, may also play a role. “The difficulty is that a founder may be so strong, and so trusted, and so deferred-to by the board that the board is actually not functioning, not providing oversight,” she says. At the same time, she allows, “some founders have never accepted that they need a board. They get a board because they have to — because it’s required by law.”

Mr. Orser, who has founded two nonprofit organizations himself, notes that some groups suffer from a sort of reverse founder’s syndrome. When he left one of the groups, the Management Center, a nonprofit consulting group in Washington, he says, “a former board member said, ‘You can’t leave, you are the Management Center.’ At first I thought, gee, that’s a real nice compliment, and then I thought, that’s awful.” Mr. Orser himself felt that he had overstayed his usefulness at the organization — he admits that he was bored by the structural and technical issues involved with growth. “Part of my problem was I couldn’t figure out what else to do,” he says. “Therefore I just stayed. It was easy to stay and it was hard to figure out what else to do.”

“Founderitis” seems to be rooted in basic human nature, says Henry D. Lewis, a consultant who specializes in nonprofit fund raising in Washington. He likens the situation to the age-old struggle between parents and growing children. (In that vein, Ms. Froning cites one nonprofit founder who confessed that relinquishing power was “like handing the car keys to a 17-year-old.”) Like a mother or father who won’t let go, founders may find themselves caught in a swirl of emotions, having invested a lot of time, energy, and ego in creating their charity. When new leaders challenge the old, a founder’s reaction may be along the lines of, in Mr. Lewis’ words, “You’re going to rip my baby from my arms!”

“I’ve heard from founders who, after being forced out of a group, want to be assured that they didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Lewis says. “In fact, they needed to move on. Their vision had not grown along with the organization. They’d reached the point where there was a conflict of interest, in essence, between what’s best for the founder and what’s best for the people they serve.”

‘You’ve Gotta Leave Sometime’

As with many pitfalls of board governance, the ideal way to avoid this problem, says Mr. Lewis, is to prevent it by creating good bylaws and sticking to them. Mr. Lewis recommends setting term limits for board members and officers — which would almost certainly include the founder. But he remains doubtful that many new organizations will heed this advice. New charities, he says, are rarely concerned with long-range issues such as board tenure. “It’s tough to ask a new organization to put term limits into their bylaws,” Mr. Lewis says, “when they’ve worked so hard to recruit the board in the first place.”

Founders themselves, Mr. Orser says, should plan for their own obsolescence. “A really good founder,” he says, “would care enough about the organization to care about how it will go upward and onward when they leave. You’ve gotta leave some time.”

But because the issues involved are often highly personal, many organizations find that they need the help of outside counselors or mediators to get through a founder-related crisis. Sometimes, Ms. Froning says, organizations beset by meddling founders may not even realize the true nature of their governance problems: “We’re often called in to train a board, and we find that what they need isn’t training, it’s counseling.” In such cases, Ms. Froning’s organization may hand the client over to a consultant who specializes in helping groups work through problems together. Mr. Orser, on the other hand, thinks that much of the hard, confrontational work can be done one-on-one, in conversations between the founder and the board president or another key leader.

In some cases, in-house talent is sufficient for the task. “They can get through [the crisis] if they have a strong chair who has the skills to step in and facilitate when needed,” Ms. Froning says, “but it takes a very special person.” She cites a current case in which one of her clients is talking its own way through a founder-related crisis. “There was a nice mix of old and new board members, and they seem to be working through this. The founder has pulled back and is playing an advisory function.”

Keeping Founders Involved

Ms. Froning recommends keeping a parting founder engaged in a positive way — or at least making sure that the former leader doesn’t become an antagonist. An advisory position, whether formal or informal, can offer a natural and dignified step down from leadership. “Informal arrangements may be as simple as having regular meetings with a board chair or executive director to get updated and give input,” Ms. Froning says. “Formal arrangements could include the creation of an advisory committee or council that a founder could chair or participate in.” A founder could remain on the board of trustees if there is not too much tension, she says, or may be asked to preside over a special task force or event: “The founder’s skills, institutional memory, and personal relationships with the board might all factor into deciding on the ideal role.”

Nonprofit founders who are strongly and publicly identified with their organizations — what Mr. Orser calls “institutionalized leaders” — can become effective promoters and fund raisers for their charities’ missions, even after they have relinquished their formal leadership roles.

Not all long-tenured charity leaders leave their posts after a crisis created by their organization’s growth. Some founders are able to adapt themselves to new conditions while remaining central to their group’s leadership. Mr. Lewis cites one of his recent clients, a well-established political organization that is still run by its original leaders. “They’ve come to understand the need for changing the structure of the board, changing the way the group functions, as the needs of the constituency change,” he says.

For the founders who eventually pack up their desks, Mr. Orser offers a bittersweet reassurance: “In most cases, the organization flourishes when the founder leaves.”

Have you encountered a case of “founderitis” in your nonprofit work? How did the charity deal with it? Tell us about it in the Share Your Brainstorms online forum.