Effective Nonprofit Leadership: Thoughts from Harvard Business School

A team of Harvard Business School professors provides an overview of the challenges and opportunities facing nonprofit leaders. Some of these professors are individuals Bryan met through his earlier work at Harvard’s Phillips Brooks House and HBS Social Enterprise Institute. Read below this video for Bryan’s thoughts on the topic.

The professors emphasize the need to understand one’s mission, pursue metrics, and be efficient. These are important points, but they are generic, and for many nonprofits, they won’t make the difference between surviving and thriving. Nonprofit leadership requires more than these elements.

One pivotal lever for impact is the ability to communicate a message powerfully to the desired service group and to the supporters of the nonprofit. To achieve the first aim, a nonprofit leader has to make the social issue as relevant, understandable, and emotionally gripping as possible to his or her constituents. The leader also needs to build a memorable and compelling identity for the nonprofit. By doing these things, the nonprofit will stand out among the many social service groups that compete for scarce resources in a community. The nonprofit will, in turn, engage its service population to the fullest and become a magnet for talented staff, passionate volunteers, and crucial grants and donations. For these reasons, communication power is at least as important as metrics and efficiency, and perhaps even more crucial.

A second lever is the ability to design and run an operating model that generates lasting results rather than short-term results among the service group. The nonprofit leader should study the dynamics of the social issue all the way back to root causes, figure out where along this trajectory the nonprofit should begin its intervention, and then time the intervention to short-circuit potential problems for the service group early in the causal chain. The leader should use his or her position to focus the nonprofit on prioritizing early-intervention activities and then seek deep impact, even if deep impact means serving fewer clients than before. Over many years, the volume of impact matters, but in the early years of an initiative, the leader should focus on testing and refining the interventions to see which approaches really take hold in clients’ lives. Don’t expand the scale or scope of the nonprofit until the service delivery model has really proven itself in practice.

A third lever is strategic recruitment and training. Earn a reputation for being a judicious selector of potential board and staff members. These people need to realize from the outset that they will be expected to commit wholeheartedly to the cause, or else they should not bother joining. It may take a while to assemble an outstanding cast, but the results will reward the leader’s care and perseverance. It is usually better to have five outstanding team members than ten good ones, since the outstanding ones can build the strongest foundation for the long term. If they introduce high-quality solutions and demonstrate a great work ethic, they will elevate the aspirations and commitment of all subsequent recruits.

Nonprofit leadership is complex, so many other factors bear consideration, too, but the above priorities will deliver the greatest impact from day one.