Joan Garry's Guide to Nonprofit Leadership. Joan Garry
off, Kermit would have figured out some way to give the founder a big role with no real power—look how he manages Piggy. He would rally the troops without shaming them. He would find the key strength in each board member and bring out the best in each of them. He would not be overly bossy with the ED — he'd offer his support and be more like a coach. And he would help staff and board keep their eyes on the prize, never losing sight of the organization's mission and vision.
Kermit may not thrive in a hierarchical work environment, but he'd be a rock star ED or board chair.
Kermit is not perfect, and he knows it. This trait is key to effective leadership. It makes him a good delegator! He is all about team, and he understands the value each team member brings to the work. He believes in diversity. He likes to work to reach consensus but never loses sight of the end game — he stays true to the cause. He is fair and listens, and he can manage high‐maintenance personalities without sacrificing the work. I also think he can disagree, and his team ultimately listens and respects his decisions (decisions they feel were made with their input).
Kermit understands what it takes to be a great leader in the nonprofit sector:
Understanding that power comes from all around you.
Recognizing that developing core leadership attributes is as important as skills building.
YOU'RE NOT ON TOP OF ANYTHING
In 1997, as the Executive Director of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination (GLAAD), I was approached by the Coors Brewing Company. Coors was interested in making a $50,000 corporate sponsorship donation to GLAAD. As our organization was still on a financial respirator, I was interested. Very interested.
But I knew the history of Coors and the gay community — the Coors family had deep ties to the Heritage Foundation, a significant funder of organizations leading the opposition to LGBTQ equality. As a result there had been a longstanding boycott in the gay community: drink any beer you like but not Coors.
A discussion with Coors illustrated to me that the company was better on gay issues inside its organization (domestic partner benefits and other nondiscrimination policies) than many other companies who sponsored GLAAD.
Should I accept the sponsorship money and in so doing help rebuild the Coors brand in the gay community? The decision was mine to make.
Or was it?
In Jim Collins’s monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking Is Not the Answer, he makes the case that power and decision‐making in the nonprofit sector are different from (and messier than) what they are in the private sector.
To be a great leader, you must erase your preconceived notions of what it means to be in charge, starting with a standard org chart like the one shown in Figure 1.1.
FIGURE 1.1 The standard org chart.
You probably have a piece of paper that shows this kind of hierarchy. Time to recycle.
Is it factually accurate? Yup. Is it how you should look at/exert your power as a nonprofit leader? Absolutely not.
So now look at the chart shown in Figure 1.2.
FIGURE 1.2 Deriving power from everyone around you.
In the org chart shown in Figure 1.1, the Coors decision is easy. I make a statement about the changes at Coors, accept the donation, make payroll, and let the chips fall where they may.
In the nonprofit sector a leader is beholden to vast and diverse stakeholders. I was hired to run GLAAD in the service of moving the needle forward on equal rights for the community I served. The bottom line matters, of course, but only to ensure that you have sufficient resources to work in the service of your mission.
In the org chart shown in Figure 1.2, the executive director derives power from all around her. This is why former Girl Scout ED Frances Hesselbein once told a reporter that she saw herself in the center and that she was “not on top of anything.”
So what did this mean for the Coors decision? The voices of the stakeholder groups around me were critical. I needed to be well‐informed, I needed strong input from different groups, and I needed a thought partner in my board chair to kick around the pros and cons. I knew the decision was ultimately mine, but I never really thought of it that way. We were all in this together.
My development director (the one I’d nearly killed — see this book's Introduction) was outraged and feared we would lose more money than we earned. We did our due diligence and determined that would not be the case. The staff was mixed — some worried I would be eaten alive by the press (given my own corporate background); others thought it was unfair to Coors when in fact by corporate standards, they were leaders.
This kind of power demands that you meet with the leaders of the Coors Boycott Committee — not to empower them, but to ensure their voices are heard — we even invited them to a board meeting.
And this kind of power demands that you see the decision from all sides. We secured a meeting with the most senior people at Coors and garnered commitments from them to do more than just donate money.
And this kind of power demanded that I put myself at a national LGBTQ conference in which several hundred community members could share their distaste with the thought that GLAAD may make this choice. In this setting, you can be sure that I heard them — many of them were yelling at me.
In the end, Coors became a corporate sponsor of GLAAD. Not everyone agreed, but everyone had a voice. All stakeholder groups were heard, and our entire process and strategy was smarter and more effective than any decision I had made on my own. This is what Jim Collins means when he talks about power in the nonprofit sector being diffuse. At its best, it creates a staff that feels valued and heard, a supportive board comfortable in challenging, and a membership that sees a process rich with integrity.
Nonprofit decision‐making at its best.
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So you can see how this can get messy, right — how quickly a staff can become disgruntled? So can your clients. You want them to be engaged in the work, to secure their opinions about decisions and policies, but must you walk a fine line. If you don't, you wind up with angry stakeholders, and you wind up fighting to make decisions that are in the best interest of the entire organization.
How about a board chair that has already made up their mind about the ED annual review process and doesn't ask for input? How valuable does the full board feel? I'm going to go with “not very.” Or, how about an ED who has already made a big decision and asks the senior staff to weigh in? That ED better pray the senior staff comes up with the same decision. Then there is the ED who listens to input and finds themself more indecisive than when they first asked.
Each of these scenarios makes things messier.
WHAT DO I DO WITH ALL THIS?
Not everyone