5 Keys to Great Nonprofit Leadership
50% of leaders will fail. Even those who were once successful often eventually fail. Leadership failure comes with significant cost. You have to recruit, hire, and onboard a new leader and employees may have left or stopped performing under the old leader.
So why do leaders fail? And how can we in L&D support them so they don't? That’s what we’re exploring in this episode.
Listen to the episode or scroll down to read the blog post ↓
Key Points:
00:58 Leadership failure
02:10 Why leaders fail
02:30 5 Things nonprofits can do to support their leaders’ success
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5 Keys to Great Nonprofit Leadership
Have you ever worked for a bad boss?
I've had the opportunity to work for some amazing leaders in my career. But at least one person probably comes to mind for all of us.
An MIT Sloan Management Review article shared that 50% of leaders will fail. Even leaders who were once successful will end up failing and eventually will be fired.
Leadership failure comes with significant cost…
Just think about the cost of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding someone new. That can be up to three times that leader's salary. Not to mention the employees who leave, or worse, just stop performing under that person's leadership.
So why do leaders fail?
The Harvard Business Review found 2 main reasons:
Inconsistency in performance
A weak future outlook
So what can we, in L&D, do about it? How can we help?
In this blog post, I’m exploring five things our nonprofits can do to support their leaders' success:
1) Hire Leaders with the Right Skills and Qualities
The first thing is to hire leaders with the right skills and qualities in mind.
Take the time to identify the skills that your organization needs right now and in the next few years:
Are you going through a lot of change? Define the change management skills that your leaders are going to need.
Are you constantly innovating? Consider how you will need leaders to adapt, prioritize, or support their teams in that type of environment.
Has organizational culture been struggling? Think about the coaching and the relationship skills that your leaders will need to rebuild that culture.
Take the time to identify what those skills are and what they look like in action. That way, you can hire with those skills in mind.
And I get it, L&D is not always a part of the hiring process, but we can be part of the skills conversation.
Let's also consider the qualities that are important:
Self-awareness
Curiosity
Empathy
Whatever quality it is for your organization, name it, and look for it in the job interview.
A lack of empathy, for example, has been found to increase leadership failure by 3.7 times, according to Gartner research. So why wouldn't we look for that in our hiring process?
We have to hire with the right skills and qualities in mind, and L&D can help define what those look like.
These episodes might help you identify some of those skills and qualities:
Episode 51: How to Use Your Competency Model to Develop a Comprehensive Training Program
Episode 39: Ask These Two Questions to Identify Your Nonprofit's Core Competencies
Episode 20: How to Determine Which Competencies Are Right for You
Episode 19: One Nonprofit's Honest Opinion after 6 Months with a Competency Model
Episode 18: Four Reasons Your Competencies Don't Work
2) Develop Leadership Skills Important for Your Organization
The second thing you can do is to develop the skills you know are important for your organization.
We've just talked about identifying what those skills are. So for leaders that are already in your organization, let's invest in them.
Once you know the skills your leaders need, you have to help them develop, grow, or maintain those skills.
So while L&D might not be part of the hiring process, we are 100 percent a part of this process.
How are you developing your leaders?
Are you sending them off to leadership programs that don't have a lot of return on your investment?
Are you creating custom leadership programs that are tailored to their work and your nonprofit?
If we know the risk of failure, why would we not spend the time and money to mitigate that from happening?
We have to develop the skills we know are important for leaders and our organizations to have.
If you don't have a huge budget, consider these five low-cost leadership development activities.
You may also want to take a look at this episode:
3) Support Your Leaders with a Coach to Uncover Their Strengths and Growth Opportunities
The third thing is to provide your leaders with a coach.
I want to circle back to self-awareness. I mentioned that as a potential quality that you need your leaders to have. Leaders need to be aware of their strengths and their growth opportunities. And if they lack self-awareness, they're 3.7 times more likely to fail than those who have the self-awareness.
Coaching can be a great way to help your leaders uncover their needs:
It's a safe, trusting relationship that gets built.
It's private.
It's one-on-one.
It's development, not discipline focused.
This coaching relationship can help open your leaders up and help them be a little bit more vulnerable. It can help them name their strengths and their areas for growth. It can help them as they navigate new or unfamiliar situations with their teams.
Coaching is hands down one of the best ways you can support your leaders.
You may want to check out this episode:
4) Hold Your Leaders Accountable for Performance Reviews and Goal Setting
The fourth thing you can do to help your leaders succeed is to hold them accountable for things like performance reviews.
We don't always like to talk about accountability, but it's important.
L&D isn't always part of the performance review process. I get that. But if you have any influence with HR, accountability is a good thing.
It's what allows our leaders to set goals and ensure their work aligns with those goals and that they're making progress toward those goals.
If your organization isn't doing much with performance reviews, consider adding goal setting into your leadership programs and find a way to add that accountability and that follow-up.
It's necessary. And when done right, it shouldn't be feared.
5) Invest in Your Leader’s Well-Being to Prevent Burnout
The fifth thing that we can do to help our leaders succeed is to invest in their well-being to prevent burnout.
In 2023, the Harvard Business Review shared that 50% of managers reported feeling burned out. And in the past year or so, burnout and employee well-being have become hot topics.
I am not a well-being expert, but I do care deeply about it. And I have some amazing well-being episodes with actual experts that you can find below:
Episode 80: How to Add Well-Being to Your People Strategy
Episode 67: A Well-Being Approach to Leadership Development
Episode 38: Dealing with Corporate Burnout? One Easy Way to Manage Stress as a Nonprofit Leader with Jessie Pagliari
Episode 30: Why Well-Being Is The Secret Sauce to Change Management with Mandy Sharp Eizinger
Now, I'm not going to claim to have that expertise, but I do want to share a few tips, especially for your leaders who are actively involved in leadership programs.
Here's the thing, when we invite our leaders into these programs, we're actually adding more work to their plate.
It's good work. It's going to help them in the long run, but in the short term, it is more work on their already expansive to-do list. \
So here are a few tips:
1. Get their leaders on board.
Whoever they report to, have them sign an agreement saying they're going to support them. Help them to see what that leader is going to be asked to do and prompt them to consider what can be shifted to accommodate this extra work that the leader is going to be doing in the leadership program.
2. Recognize what you are asking these leaders to do.
It's extra work. Recognize that. And then recognize their efforts as they do those things. Recognition can go a long way when we are asking them to do extra.
3. Create real relationships among leaders during that leadership program.
Those relationships go back with them on the job, and they will have a group of people they can call when they need support or encouragement.
Now, I'm not sure we’ve fully cracked the code on leadership. That's why so many organizations are still researching it and why so many coaches and consultants still focus on it.
But I do know we can't stop trying.
We need strong leaders in our organizations. Even more so in nonprofits. Our communities, the people we serve, and our staff all deserve it.
To hear the full conversation I had on the Learning for Good Podcast, scroll all the way up and tune into episode 105.
The Nonprofit Learning and Development Collective
Helping to change the world for good is hard enough as it is. Finding good support shouldn’t be difficult, too.
I know what it feels like to want someone to bounce ideas off of and to learn from, someone who really understands you and your work.
Nonprofit L&D leaders have been overlooked for too long. You need a place where you can meet like-minded talent development pros, learn from industry leaders and tech vendors, and find the support you need to make a real impact.
Thankfully, great nonprofit support is no longer hard to find or financially inaccessible.
Welcome to the Nonprofit Learning and Development Collective – the only community specifically for nonprofit talent development professionals.
When you join this community, you will walk away with a new, diverse, and powerful network – and a sounding board for your staff development needs.
So if you're ready to exchange ideas and collaborate with your peers, come join the Nonprofit L&D Collective.
