How Grant Makers Can Help Build Talent
Nonprofits Need to Thrive in Tough Times
LEADERSHIP MATTERS. Cor- porate leaders who create a powerful vision, set priorities, and motivate people to
achieve those goals consistently
outperform other organizations,
according to research conducted
by Bain & Company.
While the nonprofit world
lacks a common measure of return, it’s clear from our work
with mission-driven organizations that the ones with strong
leaders achieve better results.
Developing nonprofit leaders
is not just for large or well-financed organizations; it is a necessity for all nonprofit groups.
Indeed, the nonprofit world
must add 640,000 new senior
leaders—the equivalent of 2. 4
times the number now employed—over the next decade,
according to research that
Bridgespan conducted five years
ago. One of the key ways to fill
those jobs is to train more people who already work at nonprofits to become strong leaders.
Unfortunately, not enough
has been done to evaluate what
works best to develop nonprofit
leaders.
In a landmark report on the
topic, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation concluded that most leadership-development efforts failed
to do enough to learn from evaluations of what mattered most
to participants.
But a program review we conducted this year does point to
some new ideas.
We conducted an independent
assessment of the nation’s largest philanthropic leadership
program, Neighborhood Builders, operated by Bank of America.
Now in its eighth year, Neighborhood Builders is unusual in
its approach. It asks local committees of leaders to select high-performing community-based
organizations. Then it offers
leadership training to both the
executive director of the organization and an emerging leader,
plus an unrestricted grant of
$200,000 that the groups can
use to further expand their operations or apply to program
and staff costs.
Some 1,200 leaders have now
been trained and are now part
of a powerful network of people
who help one another cope with
the challenges of running a non-profit.
The Neighborhood Builders
participants credit the combina-
tion of cash, training, and peer
networks with fostering better
results at their organizations.
Participants reported that the
leadership program helped
their organization achieve its
goals (88 percent), increase or
enhance the effectiveness of its
programs (92 percent), improve
financial sustainability (80 per-
cent), and drive innovation (80
percent).
Developing leaders is
not just for large
organizations; it is a
necessity for all
nonprofit groups.
about the vision, strategy, and
priorities for their organizations. But the emerging leaders
reported significantly greater
changes than executive directors in their aspirations, knowledge, skills, and leadership capacity and confidence.
As one emerging leader reported, participating in the program “helped me see that I was
not the only one who struggled
with leadership challenges. ...
[This] helped me acknowledge
and accept that I was a leader.”
Another aspiring leader, Luis
Marquez, went through the
program at what turned out
to be an important moment of
transition for his organization.
The Puente Learning Center,
which provides free classes and
training to Los Angeles neighborhoods with high unemployment and poverty rates, was selected for the program just as
its founder retired. During the
training, other emerging leaders encouraged Mr. Marquez to
apply for the chief-executive job,
and he won the promotion.
Mr. Marquez used what he
had learned in the training ses-
sions to create a formal succes-
sion plan to prepare the orga-
nization for future transitions.
He also told us: “Now I invest
to develop leaders in each of my
departments, and our organiza-
tion is the better for it.”
While most leadership pro-
grams focus on executive direc-
tors, it is important to adopt a
rigorous selection process to
catch leaders and potential
leaders at the right stage of de-
velopment and to understand
how powerful leadership train-
ing can be for this rising gener-
ation of leaders.
THE CHRONICLE OF PHILAN THROPY MARK LI TZLER
“Oh, it starts with giving alms, but the next thing you know
the duke will hit you up for some pet charity.”
We’re not arguing that
every leadership-development
program needs a full-scale evaluation. But every leadership-development program should
identify what success would
look like and try to measure
the extent to which it’s achieving what it set out to do. Sending surveys immediately after
a program concludes is a good
start, but follow-up questionnaires and interviews are important, too. If you set individual and organizational goals for
the program (and you should),
go back six months or a year
later and see if you can assess
progress on these goals.
No leadership program gets
it entirely right from the start.
Maybe a different mix of training, mentors, and follow-up support is needed or a different
strategy for selecting participants.
But focusing on the best ways
to produce results is vital if we
are to have a supply of leaders capable of serving essential
needs in society.
Matt Forti manages Bridge
span’s performancemeasure
ment practice. Kirk Kramer, a
partner at Bridgespan, heads
the organization’s leadership
program.
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