Why – and How – Effective Nonprofit Managers Learn to Delegate

IN THE TRENCHES

By Scott Westcott

Peggy Morrison Outon faced a formidable challenge.when she was hired to lead an effort to raise more than $12-million to build a museum in New Orleans that would house 1,600 pieces of Southern art.

In essence, she says, her task was “selling a dream.”

She knew she would not be able to sell that dream by herself. She would have to enlist the help of a handful of staff members — mostly University of New Orleans graduate students — along with a team of volunteers. In short, she needed to delegate responsibilities and tasks — and do it wisely.

But instead of thinking of her task as just assigning duties, Mrs. Outon says she decided to look at it as an opportunity for what she calls “shared leadership.”

“I didn’t think of it as delegating to subordinates,” says Mrs. Outon, who left her job at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 1999 to serve as executive director of the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management, at Robert Morris University, in Pittsburgh. “I thought of it as identifying the right person to do a given action. It came down to handing work back and forth with grace and confidence.”

Mrs. Outon’s quest to get the university’s museum from blueprint to reality exemplifies a challenge faced by leaders of nonprofit organizations both large and small. With too much to do and not enough time to do it, delegating becomes an essential skill. Done well, delegating can increase an organization’s efficiency, motivate staff members and volunteers, and enhance a leader’s effectiveness.

Identifying Helpers

The first step to successful delegating is to clearly assess the staff members and volunteers who can help out, says Eric Hargis, president of the Epilepsy Foundation, in Landover, Md.

Mr. Hargis, who has also held management-level jobs at the Arthritis Foundation, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and the American Diabetes Association, says he has seen a shift over the course of his career from staff members and volunteers being limited to traditional roles to a more open approach that matches the best person to the most suitable job.

“The lines have been dramatically blurred,” Mr. Hargis says. “Some people view volunteers as envelope stuffers, but that is not really the case in nonprofits today. What nonprofits are looking for is not different than for-profits: successfully determining how to best use your resources.”

Obviously, it makes sense to assign staff members to tasks that need to be handled or tracked on a daily basis. Yet, for other chores, Mr. Hargis suggests basing assignments on skills alone.

For example, he says, if a charity is looking to promote its name and enhance its “brand” among the general public, it may be more effective to turn to a volunteer or board member who has expertise in branding from the corporate world, rather than a staff member who does not, to lead that effort.

Once the best person is identified to lead a task, Mr. Hargis says, it is essential to give clear direction about the desired result — and then get out of the way.

“A lot of people say, ‘I don’t like to delegate because it won’t get done the way I would do it myself,’” he says. “Well, everyone does things differently, but the important thing is the end product. Does it accomplish what you set out to do?”

He put that approach into action with the Epilepsy Foundation’s Entitled to Respect program, which is aimed at improving the quality of life for teenagers with epilepsy. A key part of the program is an awareness campaign developed by the foundation’s employees and volunteers.

Mr. Hargis sought to make those who worked on the campaign feel a sense of “ownership” in it. He chose several people who would be in charge of managing others to carry out a particular element of the project and gave each leader the ultimate responsibility for the project. Each employee or volunteer who worked with one of the leaders also had specific responsibilities as well.

“If a deadline is missed, you know who to go to,” Mr. Hargis says. “When the team is set up right, everyone sees their role in it.”

Reluctance to Delegate

Before nonprofit leaders can move toward a more strategic distribution of duties, they need to carve out enough time to truly evaluate how work is getting done — and what changes might lead to more efficiency and better results. Of course, in small nonprofit organizations, there is often no one to delegate to.

“Sometimes, if you don’t do it, it simply won’t get done,” Mrs. Outon says.

Yet, she says, careful evaluation of how work gets done can reveal opportunities to redistribute chores — even at the smallest charities. The trick, she says, is to do the evaluation at all.

“A lot of people are so burdened with work they don’t even take the time to stop and think about how to best break down a task,” she says. “In a lot of nonprofit cultures, there is a mind-set that it’s easier to do it yourself. There tend to be a lot of singular leaders — people who ‘burn for it’ and don’t relinquish work easily.”

Indeed, managers may need to be convinced that delegating is worth the effort, says Don Maruska, author of How Great Decisions Get Made: 10 Easy Steps for Reaching Agreement on Even the Toughest Issues (American Management Association, 2003, $21.95).

Mr. Maruska, a management consultant in Morro Bay, Calif., often works with nonprofit organizations that are not reaching their potential partly because their managers shy away from delegating responsibility.

“I find some nonprofit executive directors and managers lacking the assertiveness to delegate — they are often just thankful for whatever they have,” Mr. Maruska says. “Yet, I would argue that, because of the limited resources, delegation is even more important for nonprofits than it is for for-profit enterprises.”

Devising a Plan

The key to delegating work successfully, Mr. Maruska says, is to develop a plan for determining exactly what needs to be done, assigning the work, and then measuring progress. By establishing a plan, he says, assigning work to staff members or volunteers becomes less daunting.

He suggests the plan should start with a simple question: What needs to be done? From there, the manager needs to explain clearly why it needs to be done, when it should be completed, the rules for how it will be accomplished, and who will do the work. For team projects, a leader should be appointed who will be accountable for the project’s progress.

The plan, Mr. Maruska says, should include determining the personnel required to complete the work and how it will affect other priorities. In addition, it is important to create a system to track progress. By creating clear deadlines, everyone will know what is expected of them.

“Being clear about what needs to be done is so critical,” says Mr. Maruska. “The volunteers and staff really appreciate it and have a much better chance of getting things done. When there is not clarity, people end up going off in their own direction.”

For any delegation plan to be successful, employees and volunteers must follow with the strategic vision established by the leader, says Michael Caslin, chief executive officer of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, in New York, which teaches business skills to young people from low-income families. A group that shares its leader’s vision, he says, is more likely to accept greater responsibility and more tasks, Mr. Caslin says.

The key to developing such a team, he says, is to abandon the idea that delegating consists of “bossing people around.”

Instead, he suggests thinking more like a coach. That, he says, will help guard against what he calls the “superhero syndrome,” in which the nonprofit leader or ambitious staff member tries to do everything alone.

“That is not sustainable for the organization or the individual,” says Mr. Caslin.

In “coaching” workers and volunteers, he recommends what he calls a “trust and verify” system, in which they are given clear duties and responsibilities, and their progress is reviewed on a regular basis. By keeping close track of a project, the nonprofit leader has the opportunity to help guide employees and volunteers.

“You have to take the time to share, train, empower, and then circle back to see if there are any adjustments that need to be made,” Mr. Caslin says. “Blind delegation is just as deadly as self-absorbed tasking and not sharing work.”

A Chance to Stretch

For Barbara Roberts, dean of institutional advancement at Marymount College, in California, delegating is not only an effective way to get things done — it is also essential for helping employees to grow and advance their own careers.

“The person doing the delegating is helping others to stretch,” says Ms. Roberts. “Allowing people to do more ultimately opens the door for them to take the next step. And when it works out well, everyone shines.”

She says she has seen delegating reap unexpected benefits over the years. When an employee or volunteer is given the opportunity to take on a fresh assignment, hidden talents often emerge, such as a knack for organizing events or writing engaging copy.

“I have good people here who want to take on a challenge,” she says. “I think people want to be trusted. If they have good ideas, they want to be given more responsibility and the opportunity to see what they can do.”

Ms. Roberts, who came to Marymount in 2003, also says that she needs to delegate tasks among her six staff members in order to help her small office achieve its goals.

She remembers a time last year when a newer employee was organizing an alumni reunion. Many of the staff members had worked on the event in the past, so Ms. Roberts called them together. After a brainstorming session, she then delegated assignments. Sharing the burden, she says, helped make sure attendance at the event was high.

A Sense of Urgency

Trust and commitment were also essential ingredients for Mrs. Outon as she worked to raise the money to build the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in the late 1990s. Staff members and volunteers, Mrs. Outon recalls, worked tirelessly at generating support among local philanthropists and corporations.

With their help, Mrs. Outon created a successful fund-raising effort aimed at corporations and wealthy, socially prominent donors.

“We had to use our human resources to the greatest effect,” she says. “We were looking for six-figure gifts, and we were very successful.”

Indeed, before Mrs. Outon left her job in 1999, the $12-million goal had been reached and ground was broken for the museum that now stands in downtown New Orleans.

“What made it successful was a strong sense of opportunity,” she says. “There was a sense that if we could pull this thing off, it was going to be seriously cool. It was really fun to invent and create, and everyone involved knew they were absolutely needed.

“That’s something nonprofit organizations have going for them,” she says. “There is an urgency about what is being done. We mostly don’t have the power to make people do things. It has to be the bigger ideas that compel them to want to help. It’s more than just telling people what to do.”