Solving the Nonprofit Leadership Crisis Will Take Much Work

Nonprofit organizations and foundations suffer from a critical lack of leadership. The top executives of too many organizations lack vision, courage, a collaborative instinct, and intellectual rigor. While a few promising new leaders have begun to make their mark, their ranks are much too thin to provide great encouragement about the future.

The reasons for this worrisome state of nonprofit affairs are varied and complex. Among them:

• The phenomenal growth of tens of thousands of new, single-issue organizations has stifled expansive and creative leadership. Fragmentation of the nonprofit world has led to narrow agendas, not the broad vision necessary for outstanding leadership.
• The loss of government funds and increased competition for scarce private resources have forced nonprofit executives to spend an inordinate amount of their time and energy on raising money, leaving them with insufficient time to concentrate on planning, program, and advocacy activities.
• The corporatization of nonprofit organizations, with their escalating commercialism and questionable ethics, has helped undermine responsible and visionary leadership, fostering managers, not leaders; entrepreneurs and deal makers, not visionary designers of new programs; and egotists, not institution builders.
• The focus on celebrityhood in modern culture has led nonprofit organizations to seek stars — nationally known hotshots — to run their organizations in the mistaken belief that getting a prominent leader will be the ticket to success. The fallout from this approach is a lack of teamwork, which is an essential quality to leadership.
• The high cost of a college education, and the size of the loan debt that many students incur today, deters many young people from taking on nonprofit careers, in spite of their idealism and passion for public service.
• Limits on advocacy by participants in federal volunteer programs, such as the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, have taken a toll. Participants in those programs and other federal social-service programs used to leave to take on major positions at nonprofit groups and would serve as the backbone of many organizations. Today, many of the former volunteers don’t seem to have the same edge.

The leadership gap is especially acute at social-service and social-change organizations that espouse progressive views. The growing influence of conservatism has led to diminished concern about poverty, environmental and health protection, income and wealth inequality, and social and economic justice — and many nonprofit leaders have grown so frustrated trying to turn those trends around that they have given up.

Because the leadership problem is so enormous and challenging, several approaches will need to be taken simultaneously. None can guarantee quick fixes. Among the approaches that could be productive:

Subsidize entry-level jobs for young people. Recent college graduates face an increasingly difficult time finding entry-level nonprofit jobs that pay decent salaries and benefits. The reason: shrinking budgets or an indifference to recruiting young staff members. As a result, many people who one day could be the leaders are being discouraged from nonprofit careers and public service.

Foundations should create 1,000 fellowships, each providing $40,000 for two or three years plus benefits, and award them annually to young people who promise to work at nonprofit organizations. Such a program could make an enormous difference and would require relatively little spending given the billions that foundations fritter away on conventional, lackluster programs.

Strengthen academic centers. Academic centers on nonprofit management and public policy are not doing a good job of developing nonprofit leadership. Instead, they are producing graduates who are trained as narrow budget and policy analysts or as nonprofit managers of limited vision. To be transformed into leadership-development institutions, their curricula need to be broadened and their faculties have to expand to include nonprofit officials who have made a real difference in community or national life.

Course requirements among academic centers are currently heavily tilted toward quantitative analysis, economics, statistics, finance and budgeting, and management and personnel matters. They focus minimally on such subjects as public-policy advocacy, vision and courage, social change, lobbying, coalition building, developing government-nonprofit relationships, and writing skills. The latter are the requisites for running strong, influential nonprofit organizations. They form the heart of good leadership.

One of the most important roles of academic centers is to inspire students to public service.

College professors can teach well, and those who previously worked in public-service careers are often inspiring to young people, but by and large the influence of most scholars is limited to their narrow disciplines.

Successful charity executives, on the other hand, bring to their students not only real working experiences in the nonprofit world, but a thorough grounding in the nature and operations of tax-exempt organizations. It is the nonprofit officials who can inspire students, yet they are missing from most of the classrooms at the academic centers.

Enlist college presidents. Campus Compact, a large association of university and college presidents, has issued an impressive statement signed by more than 900 chief executives, calling for greater involvement by their institutions in community problem-solving and citizen engagement. But thus far none of the colleges have taken much action.

Only a few university and college chancellors and presidents have spoken out on major social issues and problems facing the United States or done much to help the nonprofit groups that operate in campus towns. University and college heads must begin to view their responsibilities as greater than fund raising or being a local corporate CEO. They should see themselves as key community and national players, who must speak out on the most important matters that affect our democracy.

By doing so, college presidents could become role models for their students. That is the kind of inspiration that our potential young leaders require as they make their transition into the working world. But thus far only a handful of college leaders have taken any real action.

One example for university presidents to heed is Tufts University, which not only provides cash payments to Medford and Somerville, where it operates, but also has pledged to provide $300,000 over the next 10 years to help needy students from those towns attend Tufts and to provide free use of Tufts buildings to community groups.

Renew civic education. The seeds of leadership must be sown early in young people’s lives as they attend public schools.

Classes in civics, history, and citizenship must be brought back to American classrooms. Students must become familiar with American government, the responsibilities of voting, and geography, both of the United States and of other countries. They should be required to read newspapers and follow current events, both domestic and international. They should be exposed to the political process, to politicians, and to government and nonprofit institutions.

The Council for Excellence in Government has started an important effort to increase civic learning in public schools. Supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the project is off to a good start, but it deserves and will need much more money to reach its full potential. That is the type of long-term leadership program that foundations must not ignore.

Similar efforts should be started at the local and state levels, backed by substantial philanthropic support.

Get nonprofit groups to focus on the leadership vacuum. Much of the responsibility for the leadership gap lies in the unwillingness of nonprofit groups to deal with the problem. They have repeatedly failed to recruit young people who could be future leaders, refused to plan for the inevitable transitions in staff leadership, and maintained boards of directors that do not grasp the importance of leadership development from within.

Foundations have proved to be even more egregious in their neglect of leadership development. They have looked to outsiders to fill their top executive positions and often overlooked excellent program officers within their own ranks. Career ladders in philanthropy barely exist today.

Foundation boards, composed of wealthy and professional elites, must come to terms with the fact that members of their circles, celebrity figures, and well-known scholars do not necessarily make the best chief executives. They need to broaden their vision and look at program officers and nonprofit officials as potential leaders.

Nonprofit groups will have to do a better job of building future leadership within their own organizations. More team leadership is what young, bright prospects for nonprofit jobs want and expect. They will not tolerate the old-fashioned top-down style of leadership.

Boards and executive directors must plan for leadership transitions, even though many of the chief executives may think that they will last forever. In addition, grant makers should push their grantees to think about recruiting young staff members as future leaders and developing transition plans.

Nonprofit organizations have played a critical role in shaping American society because they had the leaders with the vision and courage needed for success. Today, as the nonprofit world grows more complex, it needs strong and vital leadership more than ever.

Pablo Eisenberg, a regular contributor to these pages, is senior fellow at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute and author of Challenges for Nonprofits and Philanthropy: The Courage to Change, which was released last week by Tufts University Press. His e-mail address is pseisenberg@erols.com.