1.11.2008

On Collins’ “What Makes Powerful Nonprofit Leaders” – a conversation with Association Trends’ 2007 Young and Aspiring Association Professionals

I was asked to start a conversation going with my fellow bloggers/readers and the other eleven 2007 Young and Aspiring Association Professionals (listed at the bottom of this post, who may or may not be familiar with this kind of blog-conversation format) as named by Association Trends back in November. As I was thinking about what would be a good topic for discussion, I came across this article by Jim Collins, via an email sent by Susan Fox, VP of the Forbes Group, to the executive section listserve of ASAE.

In the article, What Makes Powerful Nonprofit Leaders, Collins discusses how leadership experience in the social sector can be incredibly beneficial in the business sector. He touches upon his theory of “legislative” versus “executive” leadership:

“In executive leadership, the individual leader has enough concentrated power simply to make the right decisions happen. Legislative leadership, on the other hand, relies more on persuasion, political currency, and shared interests to create the conditions for the right decisions to happen. In the discussion of the Survey of Leadership Practices by Jean R. Lobell and Paul M. Connolly, we see legislative leadership in action, with high nonprofit scores on dimensions like persuasiveness, encouraging participation, sharing credit, teaming, and organizational sensitivity.”

He concludes,

“Business executives can learn much from great nonprofit leaders, as they increasingly need to become skilled at both executive and legislative leadership in the face of declining concentrated power. Key employees find entrepreneurship an increasingly viable option, recruiters swarm after the best people in a war for talent, young people reject the idea of long-term employment at a single enterprise, boards and shareholders demand more executive accountability, the media exposes and amplifies flawed decisions and poor performance, and so on. If true leadership exists only when people follow even though they have the freedom not to follow -- and I believe it does -- then perhaps our next generation of great business executives will increasingly come from the social sectors, not just the other way around.”

Preaching to the choir, right? Seems to me that these quotes quite accurately reflect the skills we need to be effective. Persuasiveness, encouraging participation, sharing credit, teaming, and organizational sensitivity – sounds exactly like what we do all the time, in our dealings with volunteer members as well as staff. If we are to consider ourselves capable of being future leaders in the association sphere, it seems like this is right on the money. But beyond this, by nature of this profession, where we are learning skills every day through our own initiative (since many of us happened into the field by chance), we need those "legislative" skills but we also need to be entrepreneurial, to know how to engage members and staff in new ideas, to be comfortable with concepts of Enterprise 2.0, social media and other web 2.0 communication and engagement modes, to be comfortable with innovation.

What do you think? We’re all young and aspiring, right? (and I am including all readers in this – age is a state of mind, and if we weren’t all aspiring, we would not be here!) Are there other skills you think are essential to be a future "great nonprofit leader"?

I hereby invite everyone - and anyone! - to post their thoughts in the comments, and specifically "tag" my fellow 2007 Young and Aspiring Association Professionals as listed below. No pressure! : )

  • Betsy Boyd-Flynn, Director of Communications, Oregon Medical Assn, Portland
  • Robyn Carson, Director of Meetings and Professional Development, National Assn for Gifted Children, Washington
  • Marie Fredette, owner, Nonprofit Organization Resource Group, Phoenix
  • Michael Johnson, VP of Federal Affairs, National Beer Wholesalers Assn, Alexandria, VA
  • Katherine Muench, CAE, Asst Director, Health Administration Press, American College of Healthcare Executives, Chicago
  • Jaime Nolan, CAE, President, IntrinXec Management, Minneapolis
  • Anne-Margaret Olsson, Director, Member Special Programs, Society for Human Resource Management, Alexandria, VA
  • Jim Thompson, CAE, IOM, ED, Assn Executives of North Carolina, Raleigh
  • Amy Williams, CAE IOM, Senior Account Executive, Assn Headquarters, Mount Laurel, NJ
  • Kris Wolcott, Asst Director, Marketplace Experiences; Advertising Director, FORUM Magazine, Assn Forum of Chicagoland
  • Bana Yahnke, CMP, Director of Communications and Marketing, Family, Career and Community Leaders of America, Reston, VA


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7 comments:

  1. Thanks. Two more things, from my perspective. These are important in both legislative and executive leadership roles...but so much harder for consensus-builders.

    1) Great legislative leaders need to be fearless and prepared to make an unpopular decision if it is what's best for the organization.

    2) They also need to have vision to recognize and pursue the right opportunities at the right time.
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  2. First, I must admit that I get a bit annoyed when people get all "excited" that someone like Jim Collins is saying that nonprofit leaders might be able to "teach" corporate leaders instead of the other way around. As if it is the proof we needed to feel good about nonprofit leaders. For me, the dichotomy between the two groups isn't as important as people make it out to be. Yes, the two worlds are very different, but it seems incredibly obvious to me that BOTH worlds have a lot to learn from each other. Both worlds have issues with BOTH executive and legislative leadership. Not all nonprofit leaders are good at legislative leadership, and sometimes they hide behind the legislative leadership mandate when they refuse to make a bold executive decision.

    Second, related to your point, the whole model still focuses on the top of the organizational chart. It doesn't address what it takes in either world to lead from positions in the middle. Personally I think this is where the most interesting ideas about leadership are going to emerge in the coming years. Part of it is a generational issue--the demographics of so many Boomers and Millennials, but so few Xers, may push the boundaries of traditional hierarchical authority models. I can see this putting more of an emphasis on legislative leadership. But what I really want to explore is what really is the essence of leadership when you are what "traditional" leadership models would call a "follower?" Leadership happens at all levels. Does leading from the middle change when the top becomes more legislative?
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  3. Interesting detour from Jamie--I'd actually argue that it's more difficult and complex to lead from the middle in a legislative model because you don't necessarily have a seat at the table. You might not even have access to the people at the table.

    In the for-profit world, on the other hand, I always knew who was in charge and I knew how to gain influence with that person.
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  4. I am taking the liberty of copying part of the comment that Virgil Carter left on my blog related to this post:

    Why is it that ASAE and some of our association bloggers can't figure out how to align and communicate membership mantras and leadership mantras? For example, when we hear ASAE talk about membership, we often hear incessantly that the membership is why we exist, whom we serve and how we should measure success. We hear that all too often association leadership is "out of synch" or disconnected with membership.

    Yet when we hear about leadership, for example, we hear how important it is for leaders to be visionary, strategic, energetic, bold, courageous, making hard decisions that are best for the organization, yada yada.

    Come on. Does anyone besides me see the complete mismatch (and conflicting results) these two independent disconnected views of membership and leadership represent? Do we have the membership specialists espousing the membership mantras and the governance specialists promoting the leadership mantras, in some sort of ridiculously competitive song and dance?

    When will ASAE & the Center reconcile membership and leadership into one single, integrated and comprehensive continuum? They really aren't separate, stand alone issues, you know?
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  5. On mismatches between how we think of membership vs. leadership - it morphs for me as I think about it to a comparison between what's necessary to lead a group's membership and to lead its employees - perhaps that's the dichotomy?

    And perhaps that's (one) fundamental difference between for-profit and not-for-profit?

    That is: association leaders need to lead their staff (and that's where the bold, visionary, take-a-stand stuff is so essential, in my experience) and need to lead the organization and its members in that legislative way (that is, to put themselves and their expertise to work at the service of the volunteer leadership who are acting on behalf of their membership).

    You must do both - and that's what's perhaps more and more necessary in the for profit-world -leading multiple constituencies at once. And that's what is the hardest thing, I think.
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  6. While I agree that corporate leaders are quite effective at both amassing and utilizing resources to make a decisions, I do not believe that power equates to being able to make the right decision...there are too many examples of "just because we can doesn't mean we should". With often limited resources and an acute sense of image, I consider that many nonprofits must often employ legislative leadership, not because it is effective (sometimes it is very counter-effective in terms of actually being able to accomplish something), but because it builds consensus....

    but alas I digress...as for specific essential skills I would have to name - creativity and adaptability. While these would seem to be skills that all humans possess at some level (evolution et al) - I do not think that we are particularly good at understanding how to nurture these skills....it really isn't enough to be comfortable with innovation - as a leader you have to be able to inspire/create an innovative culture in your organization.
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  7. I like that Collins points out leadership traits, but I disagree with creating different categories of leadership, i.e.corporate vs. nonprofit and executive vs. legislative. I believe that we should empower those that are around us to sharpen their leadership skills in the areas they work in rather than focusing on their ranks and titles. I do believe that you can't teach leadership skills, but is something that an individual has to want to develop.
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