Achieving Better Results Through Shared Leadership

Abstract

These are anxious times for the nonprofit sector. Organizational leaders are being forced to implement layoffs and eliminate programs and services. Staff members of all rank continue to work despite salary reductions and widespread job insecurity. Public funding is locked up at the local, state and federal levels. As I write this, in Philadelphia, where I work, a budget impasse at the state level is forcing nonprofits to take out lines of credit to keep their doors open. And now, even the available credit is drying up. Nonprofit organizations continue to operate without the promise of their funding being restored to previous levels. They take these risks because the people who do this work are driven by both their personal and organizational missions.

Within the past five years, several studies have depicted a pending “leadership crisis” in the nonprofit sector. A combination of the proliferation of nonprofits and the aging of the sector’s current leadership led some to predict the need for as many as 640,000 new managers within the sector over the next ten years (Bell, Moyers, and Wolfred 2006). Daring to Lead 2006, a national study published by CompassPoint and the Meyer Foundation, found that three-quarters of the executive directors surveyed planned to leave their jobs within five years (Bell et al. 2006, 5). Nor has sufficient time been dedicated to succession planning or leadership development in many nonprofits. For example, Daring to Lead found that only 29% of executives surveyed had even discussed a succession plan with their board of directors (Bell et al. 2006, 7). Although turnover is not happening as quickly as the study suggested it would, it remains evident that much of current leadership will soon be moving on.

James Spillane opens his book Distributed Leadership (Spillane 2006) with a description of a classic “hero” leader in the form of a school principal for whom he once worked. This sort of superhuman individual has become the model for what a nonprofit executive should be. However, many younger professionals are eschewing the ideal of the “hero” leader. In studies by organizations like the Center for Creative Leadership (Martin 2007) and the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network (Solomon and Sandahl 2007), younger professionals have expressed new expectations about the nature of leadership in nonprofit work and different ideas about how the executive director position should look. Most of those ideas correlate with what many in the industry would argue is needed to make the job more sustainable: pay commensurate with the heavy workload and intense level of responsibility, increased work/life balance and greater distribution of responsibility for the core areas of work. These desires to reshape the executive position and a new approach to the way we work led to a concern among some veterans in the sector that younger professionals either did not want, or were not ready, to take over those leaderships roles soon becoming available.

In this article, I argue younger professionals’ concerns do not reflect lack of interest or ability, and that not just more succession planning but a fundamental shift to a shared leadership model is necessary to address the leadership gap. Moreover, this approach is more likely than traditional hierarchical approaches to succeed in today’s environment.

Of course, we must acknowledge that there is nothing new under the sun. Many models of shared leadership were first attempted in American organizations during the 1960s and ’70s. In fact, some cooperative leadership models date back much further. But most organizational structures used in the nonprofit world today still employ a hierarchical model where decisions are made at the top and implemented at the bottom. We have not yet created, or adopted en masse, the types of work environments that reflect 21st-century realities. Models for shared or participative leadership are being used in isolation by various organizations around the country, but are not widespread.

In the past it was assumed that nonprofit professionals would do this work despite the lower pay, despite the lack of resources and despite the relative powerlessness of their position because they were committed to their particular cause. We should not assume that this will continue to be the case. People coming up within the sector today want to exercise control over their work and careers, need sufficient compensation to pay off their often considerable debt and are not predisposed to conform to current expectations. A new set of incentives needs to be employed for today’s younger professionals, a fact that should not be confused with a lack of dedication on their part. In return for more reasonable workloads and other changes, young professionals are prepared to bring high levels of skill proficiency and innovative problem-solving to their organizations.