Balancing Nonprofit Leadership & Management
Nonprofit friends – it’s time we had a serious talk about our infatuation with leadership.
Leadership is a huge topic of discussion and exploration in the nonprofit sector. On LinkedIn, #leadership has more than 3.2 million followers. In publications like Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and many other industry media sources, leadership is a seemingly constant source of content that gets shared, supported, and celebrated.
Leadership is important. Full stop.
But I fear we’ve fallen so deeply in love with leadership - with the way it’s portrayed across social media and in thought leadership articles - that we’ve nearly abandoned another skill set that is critical to the advancement of our sector.
That skill set is management.
There’s an interesting – and false – binary going on in our sector right now in which “leaders” are considered virtuous, enlightened, and heroic, while “managers” are seen in a decidedly less positive light.
But the truth is our sector needs both great leaders AND great managers.
Management skills are essential to helping our organizations and communities achieve their mission, financial, and operational goals. These include skills like:
relationship building and teamwork,
clarity, prioritization, and delegation,
written and oral communication,
lived experience and subject matter knowledge,
people development and teaching,
resource allocation, and
critical thinking
When we de-emphasize the importance of management, we inadvertently say that skills like these are not as important to us.
That they’re not worth investing in.
And that perspective is exacerbating some of the biggest challenges in our sector related to employee turnover and creating cultures where our staff and volunteers have a strong desire to stay.
Leaders may paint a vision for where we’re going and what it will look like when we get there, but strong managers create the structure and support the team needs to see the journey through.
It’s okay for us to keep loving leadership – but let’s move away from an unhealthy infatuation to a more balanced love that elevates the principles and skills needed for great management, too.