* This proved to be a wise decision when the Indian government in 2021 stopped us from funding frontline partners in that country—causing us to close down our work there in 2023. What could have been a huge blow for the organization if we had concentrated the bulk of our programs in that high-prevalence country was cushioned by the fact that we were already operational in a number of other countries by then.
* I talk more about how the COVID pandemic had an impact on the Freedom Fund, and forced us to rapidly change our strategy, in the chapter on People.
* See chapter one, Mission.
* Another useful explanation is: “A theory of change is the empirical basis underlying any social intervention—for example, the belief that a young person’s close relationship with adult role models can reduce his susceptibility to violence, or that regular visits by registered nurses to first-time pregnant women can improve parenting skills and children’s outcomes.” Paul Brest, “The Power of Theories of Change,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2010.
* See, for example, “Abstinence Education Programs: Definition, Funding, and Impact on Teen Sexual Behavior,” Kaiser Family Foundation website, June 1, 2018, www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/fact-sheet/abstinence-education-programs-definition-funding-and-impact-on-teen-sexual-behavior/; and Kathrin F. Stanger-Hall and David W. Hall, “Abstinence-Only Education and Teen Pregnancy Rates: Why We Need Comprehensive Sex Education in the US,” 2011, PLoS ONE, 6(10). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0024658.
PEOPLE
Build the Organization
No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.
—Reid Hoffman1
At the beginning of 2020, the Freedom Fund was in a good place. The organization was six years old and growing quickly in size, impact, and reputation. We had solid finances. Our staff surveys showed consistently high levels of staff satisfaction. We were in the first year of implementing a new strategic framework. We had plans to expand into a couple of new countries and deepen our work to build a movement of women and survivor leaders.
Then COVID-19 hit. Like everyone else that March, we could see it coming. We closed our biggest office, in London, a week before the UK government mandated it. We then rapidly shuttered the rest of our offices around the world. Soon after, distressing reports started coming in from our programs of the devastating toll that the disease and lockdowns were
exacting on the highly vulnerable communities we worked with in Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Thailand. There was going to be a significant increase in exploitation of these communities—in the form of sex trafficking, forced labor, and child marriage—as desperate people took ever greater risks to survive, while being preyed upon by those all too willing to exploit desperation.
This perfect storm presented me with the most challenging situation I had ever confronted as a leader. I was desperately worried about the impact the pandemic would have on the vulnerable populations we served and our ability to support them in these hard times, especially if our own organization started struggling. I was deeply concerned about the health and safety of our staff, particularly those in low-income countries with overwhelmed health services. I was apprehensive that the stress of the pandemic might undermine staff motivation and cohesion. I was nervous about our finances; would the pandemic cause our donors to cut their funding, given the febrile economic climate? And, like most others, I found lockdown hugely challenging for my own well-being. In my case, my two daughters lived in Brussels with my ex-wife, normally a two-hour train ride away through the tunnel under the English Channel. I used to spend every second weekend with them, but restrictions on international travel meant I didn’t get to meet up with them for the first three months of the pandemic, causing me considerable distress.
In the midst of all of this, I had to work out how to best lead the organization through this unprecedented crisis. I concluded early on that keeping our organization’s purpose—to serve the most vulnerable— front and center in our response would be motivating and empowering for our staff in these uncertain times. We were all acutely conscious that vulnerable populations were going to be the hardest hit by this pandemic. Serving them gave us something to unify around. But this was easier said than done. How would a focus on purpose translate into concrete action?
I decided that the first order of business was to ensure stability within the organization at a time of great flux, so we were best placed to carry out our mission. Then we would double down on that mission.
To provide stability, I had to adapt my leadership style. In recent years I had worked to bring more of a coaching style to my leadership, focused on supporting staff to achieve their goals. This style was well suited to “peacetime” leadership. But this crisis required a more authoritative approach. I needed to project calm confidence and reassure staff that we were well placed to weather the crisis and support those we served, even if I wasn’t entirely confident that that was the case.
As a first step, I convened an all-staff call in late March. I said we had the financial resources to weather the pandemic through the rest of the calendar year at the very least, and that we would not need to lay off any of our staff or make any cuts to salaries or funding to partner organizations. I believed that to be the case, but it would be dependent on our funders standing by us. My next step was to reach out to all of those funders, many represented on our board. To their credit, they all maintained their funding, and several increased it.
The next priority was our mission. To support the many frontline organizations we partnered with in low-income countries—who were buckling under the weight of pandemic-driven demand—we made our funding highly flexible so that they could determine their priorities in this time of crisis. Many of them used the funding for emergency food and medical supplies for local communities. We then went further and set up an emergency response fund for which we raised millions of dollars in additional funding from existing donors and some new ones. That fund not only had the very direct benefit of providing additional resources to frontline partners at a time of deep need but provided our funders and staff with a concrete way to respond to the crisis, giving them a sense of direction and agency at a time when many were overwhelmed by the suffering we were seeing in our program countries.
I was impressed, and moved, by how well our whole organization pulled together. It was a testament to the culture we had collectively built for the organization over the previous six years. Consistent with that culture, the leadership team was transparent with staff about the unfolding situation, the risks we faced, and our plans to mitigate them. In turn, we asked staff to be flexible and to recognize we were operating in unprecedented times, and that our primary responsibility was to provide even greater support to the communities we served.
The organization rapidly adjusted to remote working. Teams found different ways to communicate and share information even though they couldn’t meet in person. Our approach of working closely with frontline organizations proved to be a particularly effective model during this time of crisis when many of the bigger, more centralized international nonprofit organizations were hamstrung by their unwieldy top-down model and overly dependent on expatriate leadership.
It was a difficult time. All of our staff in India had family members or friends who died of COVID-19, as did many other staff in countries such as Ethiopia and Brazil. The toll on vulnerable communities was appallingly high. But it would have been even higher if not for our ability to provide support throughout the pandemic.
We came out of those two years a stronger and more cohesive organization. By the time the worst of the pandemic was over in early 2022, staff morale was even higher than it had been before the pandemic started, according to our internal surveys. We had expanded our programs and had gained new funders, ending up in a more robust financial position than we started—all the better to meet the increased demand for our support following the pandemic.
I have a number of reflections as I look back on those early days of the pandemic, now that the worst appears well and truly behind us. The crisis powerfully reinforced my belief in the importance of effective leadership and culture and teams, and the motivational power of purpose. Culture was absolutely key. In times of crisis, what mattered most were the unwritten rules and behaviors of the organization as a whole, and of teams within the organization. These couldn’t be created on the fly but needed months and years of investment. Our purpose was a constant throughout and helped all of us maintain a sense of direction and commitment. It underpinned our culture.
And that’s what I want to talk about in this section. We will first look at the CEO, the most senior member of the organization’s people. We will identify the issues a CEO should prioritize amid the multiple claims on their time and attention. We’ll explore leadership styles, and how successful nonprofit leaders use purpose as a motivating force. We will then examine why creating a positive, purpose-focused culture is so important to the effective operation of the organization as a whole and teams within it. As organizations navigate a time of significant social ferment and change, we will explore the importance of embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion into an organization’s values and culture and how, done well, this further strengthens the culture. Finally, we’ll look at one particular category of your people, namely your board members, and the importance of maintaining a strong and productive relationship between the board and the CEO.
CHAPTER 4
The CEO
Determine Your Priorities and Style
Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.
—Mary Parker Follett1
My most bruising, and formative, leadership experience involved a staff rebellion caused by my serious mishandling of events. It unfolded in the depths of the financial crisis in 2009. At the time I was deputy president of the International Crisis Group, with overall responsibility for our operations, finance, and human resources. Given the hugely uncertain financial environment, the board directed the organization to cut spending by 10 percent, which I fully agreed with. A few days later, senior staff left for a long-planned retreat in the medieval Belgian town of Bruges, a few hours from Crisis Group’s headquarters in Brussels. It could have been a timely occasion for senior staff to thoughtfully work through the savings we would need to make. But that was not how I approached it.
From the first time I led a small team at work, I had always been a decisive leader. This style had served me well. I liked making decisions and enjoyed the responsibility. But I was not a consultative leader; I was more unilateral in my decision-making. I tended to see consultation and consensus-building as an unnecessary constraint on my decision-making power—as something that slowed a team down and obstructed timely action.
The CEO had given me broad responsibility to work out how best to make the savings, in a way that would have the minimum impact on the organization’s overall effectiveness. My first priority was to make cuts as quickly as possible, so we would start benefiting from the savings immediately. And the second was to focus on making a few deep cuts—mainly to staff in lower-priority areas, or who were not performing well—rather than squeezing the entire organization. I thought that to achieve these outcomes, it would be better to barrel through quickly, rather than consult with all our senior staff and face coordinated pushback. Accordingly, in the short time between our board meeting and our retreat, I identified a number of staff members who would need to go, and a couple of other robust savings measures. I got the sign-off from the CEO and then advised relevant supervisors which of their staff were to be made redundant. That was the state of play when we all arrived in Bruges.
Not surprisingly, my decisions were not well received by senior staff, who objected to the lack of consultation and to many of the proposed measures. They responded by convening their own late-night meeting, excluding the CEO, finance director, and me. The next morning they demanded one of them chair the retreat in place of the CEO and insisted that we reopen the whole process and work together collectively to decide on the best course of action. This was a seismic development for an organization long accustomed to an authoritative, verging on authoritarian, CEO. That said, the CEO handled this all pretty graciously, given the direct challenge to his authority, perhaps sensing now was not the time to try to impose his will. For my part, I was deeply distressed at the way events were unfolding and the realization that my mishandling of the process had led to a staff revolt. But I also accepted that, having mismanaged the process, I now needed to swallow my pride and work with senior staff to come up with the best outcome.
A few things happened as we huddled in groups to explore program and department budgets across the organization. First, it became clear that senior staff members were not opposed to making savings. They all understood the imperative, but believed we could identify the right strategies better collectively than in isolation. The most senior layer of staff volunteered reductions in their salaries. Many of our program teams proposed savings that hadn’t already been identified. Of course, this meant that we would end up squeezing the organization as a whole rather than identifying discrete areas for deep savings, but I’d surrendered that opportunity by making that decision on my own. On the plus side, this turn of events meant that all of our senior staff were brought into the decision-making process, and they committed to bringing the rest of our staff along with the need for savings.
Within a year of the retreat, we had reduced expenditure by 15 percent, and the following year we had secured enough new income to invest more heavily in priority areas. As for me, I learned two important things: First, that being “decisive” did not mean that I had to be unilateral in my decision-making or that I couldn’t or shouldn’t consult and engage others in decisions that directly affected them. And second, that a thoughtful process and consultation will generally lead to better outcomes with greater buy-in. I’ve taken this to heart ever since. Perhaps all of this should have been obvious from the beginning, but I suspect many new leaders worry that engaging others in their decision-making is a sign of weakness, rather than the demonstration of confidence that it should be. We all learn along the way. I certainly did.
HOW SHOULD YOU LEAD?
Stepping into the CEO role for the first time is daunting, whether at a start-up nonprofit or a big, well-established charity. The job becomes only marginally less daunting after you have been leading for a while. You are always hugely aware of all of the responsibility that comes with leadership: to inspire staff and other key stakeholders with your vision for the organization; raise enough funding to keep the doors open and, hopefully, grow; manage sometimes tricky board and staff dynamics; design and implement the strategy; and deliver impact. For me, the heaviest burden is the recognition that if I fail, those we serve—for the Freedom Fund, some of the world’s most vulnerable people—will likely not get the support they desperately need, and staff may be out of a job. The buck always stops with the CEO.
So, let’s assume you are a recently appointed CEO. You have a torrent of questions rushing through your mind about how to be the best leader you can be—and an overflowing inbox. In my experience, there are four aspects of leadership a leader needs to think through. These are: your priorities, your style, your own well-being, and (eventually) your successor. Let’s take each of these in turn.
YOUR PRIORITIES
