Effective Leadership Development in Nonprofit Organizations

The state of leadership in some nonprofit organizations involves the presence and characteristics of socially popular leaders, who operate in an institutional vacuum with cult-like followers. These leaders and the organizations they lead are stuck in an ever-emerging organizational life cycle. An ever-emerging organization life cycle is an organization that is developmentally unevolved, less resilient, and unstainable. To passively supporting this type of organization and leadership style is to participate in the growth of an unhealthy and unstainable organization. Organizations that mirror that type of characteristic lack the necessary foundational development to incubate, effectively, long-term institutional success. Essentially, these organizations lack the tools necessary to survive.

Anti-intellectual and anti-organizational characteristics are a challenge and a direct indicator of ineffective governance. The presence of ineffective leadership directly affects organizational resilience and sustainability. Many nonprofit organizations have leaders who lack vision, skills, capacities, and organizational development concepts. The absence of these key indicators of organizational leadership success will ultimately lead to organizational death or probable malfeasance. Ultimately, leaders that lack basic functional organizational leadership qualities or competencies are handicaps to effective organizational governance. The lack of core leadership competencies is a threat and deterrent to efficient organizational governance.

Many organizations lack strategic thinking and capacity to rebuild after the integration of generationally catastrophic and ineffective leadership. Status quo leadership is incompatible and a threat to healthy organizational development. Status quo leadership’s primary passive function is to institutionalize, promote, protect and reinforce ineffective leadership practices and failures. The larger question surrounding organizational resilience centers on leadership identification, grooming, selection, and institutions’ use and understanding of best practices. Organizational leaders, who through assessment identify these signs and characteristics, are in immediate crisis and need professional help. This ineffective leadership model supports, sustains, and encourages anti-intellectualism and status quo malfeasant leadership. This is not a healthy model and it will not sustain healthy and effective organizational development.

How can leaders and stakeholders determine accountability, outcomes, and measure for long-term institutional success? How do Individuals who have talent and passions, but lack the skill capacity, develop the core competencies required for functional success? Can an organization survive this type of leadership incompetence? Franklin (2018) and Schneider (2009) suggested reframing organizational leadership profiles as a tool and strategy to long-term institutional success and sustainability.

Redefining leadership characteristics, ongoing board training, succession planning, and internal and external stakeholder development are effective strategies to promote governance and organizational resilience. For stakeholders, this includes assessing your toolkit and determining how best to volunteer your social and intellectual capital. Stakeholders’ voices and their collective social capital can positively affect problematic institutional paradigms. An engaged stakeholder’s voice, support, and skills are critically important to an institution’s effective evolution, development, and long-term stability.

Engaged and professionally skilled organizational leaders, who are member- and stakeholder centric, are critical to the success and evolution of nonprofit organizations. Their deployment of social power and social capital offers solutions and best practices for failing and emerging organizations. Social capital can be viewed as individuals with personal capital and political and social influence. Has your organizational completed and environmental scan that examines key stakeholder intersections and like-minded cause advocates? I recommend social capital as a tool and strategy for organizations seeking strategies to aide organizational development and resiliency challenges. Social and political capital use can be observed in fully evolved nonprofit organizations. Effective social and political capital use can be measured by examining donor support, unrestricted financial resources, key stakeholder engagement and involvement, board member development, and executive leadership growth. The collective use of social power and social theory is a foundational tool in an organization’s life cycle. (c)

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