Bias Plays Role in Incompetent Nonprofit Management

To the Editor:

Mark R. Kramer observes that nonprofit management is too often a contradiction in terms and that the problem starts with donors, who confuse vision and charisma with competence (“Donors Too Often Support Visionaries Who Don’t Have Management Skills,” The Chronicle, January 11).

I have had a 40-year career in managing and consulting, roughly equally split among government, the for-profit sector, and the nonprofit world, including work with several foundations. My experience says that Kramer is mostly right (too often the state of management in the nonprofit world is nothing short of appalling) but that there is much more to the matter.

First, the fundamental problem is that too many in the nonprofit world, both donors and doers, have simply no knowledge, experience, or training in modern techniques of leadership and management as those disciplines have evolved in medium-sized and larger for-profit organizations in, say, the last 30 years.

We know now that leadership is much more than vision and charisma; it is a set of specific interpersonal actions by which leaders inspire, motivate, and enable people, often in teams, to do what is needed for organizational success. And managing complex organizations includes budgeting, financial controls, effective human-resource policies, and organizational development. These are techniques; they are teachable.

Ignorance of such techniques can be lamented, excused, and eventually corrected through training; but bias is harder to exorcise. And, too often among both donors and doers there is an implicit, unacknowledged, Marxist-rooted bias against management as “something those terrible profit-seeking people do.”

Too many nonprofit leaders seem to feel that “since we’re doing the Lord’s work, we don’t have to sully ourselves with such things as leadership and management techniques.” This bias needs to be confronted; truly valuing our causes requires that we value leadership and organizational competence as much as commitment. Nonprofits can learn a great deal from the for-profit sector on these matters.

Second, it is important to distinguish among the various natures of nonprofits, especially their size. Larger, institutional nonprofits (hospitals, universities, schools, museums, large social agencies, etc.) are different in kind than the medium-sized and smaller nonprofits that provide myriad community, social, artistic, and other services. I suspect Mr. Kramer is talking mainly about the latter.

Larger nonprofit institutions more often resemble their sister organizations in government than they do large corporations. Their problems are mainly those of bureaucracy, sometimes external controls, and dominance by professional guilds.

Still, they often offer some training in leadership and management, use some complex management systems, provide staff development services, and pay some obeisance to the needs of “professional development.” Too often, though, top leadership positions are awarded on the basis of professional accomplishments and credentials, not management or leadership; and that can breed the trouble Mr. Kramer cites.

Medium-sized and smaller nonprofits more often resemble small businesses. Both are generally lean, overworked, under-resourced, and led by highly committed people who often don’t know much about leadership and management. But small businesses benefit from the discipline of the bottom line and of investors and lenders who care about competence.

In smaller nonprofits, the ignorance of modern leadership and management is most compounded by the bias I’ve cited and the factors Mr. Kramer cites — funders who care more about purpose than proficiency, about project impacts than organizational development, about direct costs than what they dismiss as “overhead.” In both kinds of organizations, the first thing deep-sixed in a financial crisis is any thought of staff training.

As Mr. Kramer notes, there has been growing attention to and legitimization of nonprofit leadership and management. This requires a change in funding patterns, at least among larger donors, and a concern with organizational fitness, with fields instead of projects. That is what the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation’s new initiative is all about — developing a field of practice (in this case, youth development), which means lifting a set of national youth agencies to their next appropriate stage of organizational evolution.

I hope this includes training in how to be both leaders and managers.

Basil J. Whiting
Management consultant
Brooklyn, N.Y.

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To the Editor:

I applaud the approach taken by Mr. Kramer in his excellent article and wish that more fund-raising and foundation professionals adhered to the guidelines that he suggests. It’s a real shame that so many philanthropic resources go to organizations that have serious management problems and don’t provide a good return on donors’ investments. It’s an even bigger shame that this is a problem that the fund-raising and nonprofit worlds, at large, are not willing to engage.

I’m a consultant in grants and foundation relations and often find myself telling prospective clients that they need to address critical management issues before I can write a proposal for them. Their response is usually to find another consultant.

Lynn Stearney
Kensington, N.H.