Nonprofit University Blog

This is the story of Goldilocks and the three executive directors, though there is no happy ending here.  After all, this isn’t a fairy tale but real life!

For the last three years, I’ve been facilitating what we call CLEAR Circles (Cultivating Leadership Excellence and Responsibility) for emerging leaders.  Emerging leaders are individuals who serve in management positions reporting directly to the organization’s executive director.  CLEAR Circles started almost eight years ago for us as groups of executive directors who meet once a month for nine months for two hours of peer-to-peer problem solving.  Three years ago, we created our first circle for emerging leaders; this year we have three such circles.

Over the years and over the emerging leaders, I’ve begun to hear a theme that distresses me no end:  most executive directors don’t know how to be executive directors.

This executive director is too manic! What, the first time I heard this description, exactly did that mean, I wondered?  This is the executive director whose mantra appears to be “let’s do this; let’s do that” without any regard for how “this” or “that” will be funded, staffed, sustained, etc., let alone whether it fits with the mission.  Some might think that manic (from mania, “excessive or unreasonable enthusiasm”) much too negative an appellation for what is really very creative—do I hear some people saying “visionary”—leader.  But I would have to disagree.

The executive director who assigns idea after idea of new programs to his direct reports without regard for the implications and ripple effects for the organization as a whole, is not a leader or manager of any sort.  I’ll admit that creativity, thinking of new ways to fulfill those mission promises, is a very exciting and rewarding part of being an executive director.  But doing so without regard to sustainable revenue streams for the program, staffing, mission fit, and what starting something new will mean for existing programs is irresponsible, inconsiderate and simply bad management and leadership.  Manic executive directors scare me; they are to me the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and may as well be saying, “Off with their heads!”  The effect is the same for the staff members who are required to drop everything and respond to this day’s or month’s “brilliant idea” and the clients who suffer as a result.

This executive director is too passive.  Apparently, there are an awful lot of executive directors out there who cannot say “No,” “Enough,” “This has to stop,” “We have to let you go,” etc.   Yet, at the same time, they have no problem letting their direct reports be their “hatchet” person, the no-sayer (which is very different from being a nay-sayer), the deliver of “uncomfortable” news.  What is that about?  And apparently, there are an awful lot of executive directors out there who are very mysterious—and I don’t mean exotic and exciting.  I mean it is a mystery as to what it is that they do!  This is the executive director who is out more than she is in, the one who is so frequently unavailable, whether in the office or not, the one who can only do one thing at a time (though expecting everyone else to juggle incessantly), the one who never responds to anything.  This is the executive director, who, in essence, leaves the ship rudderless but empowers no one to pick up the slack.

This executive director is too irresponsible—my label, not the emerging leaders.  They are much, much kinder and talk about the need to “manage up.”  Managing up is a euphemism for making a boss’ life easier while the employee takes more and more onto her plate.  Things that the boss should be doing!  I know that many management gurus and career coaches think that managing up is good:  it gets the one managing up noticed, builds his skill set, demonstrates competence, etc.  To me managing up sounds like enabling the boss to continue not to do his work while someone else works 12 hour days and the boss gets all of the credit.  Oh, what fun!  May I please be the one to do that?

It is true that there are times when a good, strong executive director should be creative and enthusiastic to turn around a dying organization or breathe new life into a service area.  Yes, there are times when, in an effort to develop someone’s leadership potential, it is right for the executive director to step back and say, no, this time I think you are ready to do this unpleasant task and severe the relationship with this consultant.  And, absolutely there are times when it is good for the executive director to work unnoticed in the background, perhaps laying the ground for someone else to receive the kudos and attention.  And there is no doubt always room to provide the boss with a little nudge and offers of support.  But these are sometime things and should be part of the same human package.  No one of them should ever be the dominant modus operandi of an executive director.

I know near perfect executive directors are out there.  If you see Goldilocks, point her in the right direction.  She’s feeling rather tired.

Leadership Ventures, a nonprofit in Indianapolis with a mission to build and support the volunteer and executive leadership of nonprofits, has only one message on its multi-page website.  It is a “Dear John” letter addressed “Dear Friends.”  As of 30 June 2010, Leadership Ventures will severe its relationship with the world, closing down, a causality, so they say, of the economy.  To me, it is the causality of shortsightedness and a failure to understand.

I do not know Leadership Ventures; in fact, I only learned of them in reading about their demise.  So, why am I mourning?  It isn’t the first and it won’t be the last nonprofit to close its doors; and, as readers of this blog know, I am a fan of slimming down the nonprofit sector.  So, why do I want to scream at the top of my lungs?

People simply do not understand the importance of nonprofit boards.  They do not understand the important job—and yes, it is a job, albeit that wonderful oxymoron of descriptors, a volunteer job—that boards have to do for the nonprofits they lead.  They do not understand the immense value-add nonprofit boards can bring to the nonprofits they lead.  And because they do not understand this, they do not recognize the significance of professional development to allow those in this volunteer job to develop and/or hone the skills and knowledge needed to do this job well.  The need for professional development does not impugn the skills and knowledge that board members bring with them, the skills and knowledge that they use day in and day out in their day jobs and may bring to bear around their nonprofit board table.  Professional development specifically for board members, however, addresses the unique roles and responsibilities of being a nonprofit board member, it helps board members grow into being the best board member they can be.  And based on the thousands of board members I’ve met over the decades—whether serial board members like myself or first-timers, and everything in between—every one of them could use some help in being stronger, better board members.

And the good Board of Leadership Ventures found that out.  To fuel their decision making process, the Board commissioned a feasibility study to understand for real whether there was a need for the services of Leadership Ventures.  Their data showed “a high need for governance training and the development of charitable leadership.” Leadership Ventures had been providing that service, having helped over 30,000 paid and volunteer leaders over the course of their lifetime.  So, that was the good news.  The bad news was that the study also found that “the resources are not there to sustain them.”  Huh?

A nonprofit has the data to prove a) the need for its service, b) the successful provision of that service and c) the absence of competition for that service, but no one wants to fund them going forward.  What am I missing?  Why do we—board members and donors—not understand the centrality of board work to the success of a nonprofit? Why do we—board members and donors—accept the fact that professional development is of the essence in our day jobs but not in our volunteer jobs?  How do we—board members and donors—let a champion of achieving the best nonprofit boards possible close its doors—in Indianapolis, small or large town, USA, anywhere?  Don’t we understand that without educated, smart-working boards, nonprofits will only be a shadow of their full potential?

Merriam Webster defines empathy as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.”  Say what?

WordNet, brought to us by Princeton University, puts it nice and sweetly, defining empathy as “understanding and entering into another’s feelings.”  Well,  according to a recent study from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, current college students are not nearly as good at understanding and entering into another’s feelings as college students of the 1980s and 1990s were.  This, you might think, doesn’t bode well for the nonprofit sector, but I am not so sure it matters in the least.

Let’s begin with the questions.  And, please, do not get me wrong:  I am a long-time fan of the work of the Institute for Social Research and believe that the Institute and folks affiliated with it do great, great work.  But some of these questions are ridiculous, and in some cases violate the rules of constructing good questions.  And I know it is a little late in the game to be quibbling over the questions, because if these are the questions used 30 years ago, then these are the questions that have to be used today if comparisons to the past are to be made.  I fully understand that, as a point of logic and as a researcher myself.  But how do you ask if they have tender and concerned feelings about people less fortunate than they.

I confess, I do not generally have tender feeling towards them, but I am always greatly concerned about them, to the point that I will and do take action.  I cannot answer that question with a 5 (out of 5).  Does that make me not empathetic?  And when I see someone being taken advantage of, unless they are in some ways incapable of helping themselves, I do not, as the question asks, feel protective of them; I do, however, feel enraged and want to take action to prevent such behavior happening again.  Once again, I could not answer this question with anything close to a 5 (out of 5).  And I cannot answer “correctly” (by which I mean the right answer for an empathetic person) the question that asks whether I am “quite often” touched by things that I see or the one inquiry as to whether I am “soft hearted.”  Yet, in answer to the question that asks directly, how well does the statement “I am a very empathetic person” fit you, I can answer that question, in a heartbeat, with a 5 out of 5.  I have now taken the survey three times, each time getting a different score (which should NOT happen in good research), ranging from below the well below the average of current college students–51 out of a possible score of 70­­–to an equal spread above current college students.  Take the survey yourself.

Taking the survey for the first time and seeing where I fell, which was above the current college student average, I began to wonder.  I’ve spent my whole career working in the nonprofit sector, working to help others; and this work began in elementary school.  Have I gotten less empathetic with age?  Or, does empathy, as measured on this standard of empathy measurement, not really mean much when it comes to how we actually conduct our lives?

So, I asked the seven other folks who work at The Nonprofit Center to take the survey and let me know their scores (anonymously, if they preferred).  I wanted to check things out:  did I need to be worried that the future generation of leaders as represented by current college students isn’t going to be interested in helping others? would they abandon the good works of the nonprofit sector?

The score I received on my third taking was the lowest score among the staff here.  The score from my first taking, however, was neither the lowest nor highest, and by a considerable margin in some instances.  The lowest score was shared with me with an off hand comment to the effect of, “I must not be very empathetic.”  But when I responded to this person by saying, “But I know you would do anything for a person in need,” I was told the following story.  Driving down the street one night, this employee, let’s call her Carla, saw an elderly woman fall.  She and her friend got out of the car to help the woman but could not lift her.  A man, let’s call him Joe, walking down the street stopped, helped lift up the woman and got her to Carla’s car.  In driving the woman to her house, Carla, who had been very unhappy with how the fallen woman had eyed the man who stopped to help, made sure to converse with her friend, in a voice loud enough for the fallen woman to hear, something to the effect of how you can’t judge books by their covers.  Upon arrival at the woman’s house, Carla helped her up the steps, made sure she was settled, asked if there was anyone—friend or relative—who she could call, and then left.  And yet Carla’s empathy score fell below that of the least empathetic college generation in 30 years!

The demonstration of empathy is not how we score on a test; it is how we chose to live our lives, day in and day out.  Fifty-one out of 70:  you don’t scare me!

But just in case, here’s a link on how to increase your empathy.

I subscribe to several virtual clipping services that send me, daily, the headlines of stories about nonprofits from around the country and, occasionally, from around the world.  I subscribe to several because, despite the redundancy, there are, more often than not, unique items on each service.

But why do I do this?  I get more than enough e-mails on a daily basis so why add more that I need to read?  First, it allows me to maintain a national perspective.  Are the things going on in Philadelphia, for example, unique to the City of Brotherly Love or is the same thing happening in The Big Apple, Sin City and/or The Big Easy?  Second, it allows me to keep on top of the recurring issues that plague nonprofits, big or small, old or new, mid-Atlantic or southwest.  Third, it helps frame some of what we develop and do here at The Center.   And fourth, it keeps me chuckling!

To wit, one of today’s clipping services had the following combination of stories that had my going.  Headline number one:  “Again—Politics and Charity Strange Bedfellows.”  Nothing strange about it.  It just shouldn’t be!  It is right up there with dating your boss or having the executive director be on the board or nepotism.  There are some things that simply do not go together.  In this case, the strange bedfellows are a California state senator running for a US congress seat who used $175,000 from his state senate political account (which, by California law can be used to make a donation but cannot be used to fund a Congressional race) to make a donation to a Colorado-based nonprofit—actually, according to his latest campaign report, it was a $25,000 donation and a $150,000 loan.  In turn, the Colorado nonprofit ran ads a few weeks before the election featuring the state senator promoting a concert for veterans at a resort and casino that appears to be in the district of the sought seat.  The ads were not an endorsement of the politician, but timing is everything and perception is absolutely reality.  There is nothing strange about these bedfellows, though plenty of other adjectives can apply:  imprudent, unwise, ill-advised, injudicious, and just plain stupid.

My favorite headline of the day, however, was this one:  “Charity that Protects Rhinos Condones Their Killing.” I confess that I had to read the headline several times, sure that the writer had confused his condones and condemns or that the proof reader had fallen asleep at the job.  But, alas, neither of those thoughts was the truth of what happened; the truth is the headline.  It seems that the British charity, Save the Rhino (and the name mostly says its mission) has created one of the most convoluted logics I’ve ever had the struggle of trying to understand in exchange for, to date, £32,000 (around $47,000).  Save the Rhino has linked horns with Safari Club International, an organization that auctions off rhino “trophy hunts to [wealthy] shooting enthusiasts.”  Excuse me?  I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of that board meeting as the trustees figured out how to justify putting the words “save” and “trophy hunting”  in the same sentence!  But it gets better when you hear the “logic” from Save the Rhino.  It uses phrases like not being “sentiment-driven” and “sustainable use of animals” with “not wanting to see animals killed” and “looking at all the different ways we can make sure we get money for conservation coming in.”  Sustainable for whom?  The rhinos or Save the Rhino?  It seems that Save the Rhino has shifted its sight from mission to rhino derriere.  What was this organization thinking?

Nonprofits, pay attention! We do not operate in a vacuum; our actions do have consequences; others are watching and adding two and two and getting four.  There is rarely any truly any easy money.  Think carefully about the implications of what you do, no matter the size of the “reward” money being offered.  You do not want to be the headline that makes folks chuckle.