I have been the CEO of the African Women’s Development Fund for nearly two years. I started this job while the COVID-19 pandemic made in-person connection virtually impossible—and yet I had a short window to create connections and build trust with the team, the Board, and our partners and donors. I responded by making Zoom my home. I spent hours in one-on-one meetings with folks, video on, which was not ideal for the introvert in me. I had to find ways to re-create the warm, informal, unscripted interactions with colleagues and partners that I would have made in person. It worked out, but it was exhausting!
As a first-time, younger CEO, it took me a while to build my own self-confidence. Having spent my first couple of months in learning and listening mode (thanks to a two-month handover period with my predecessor—highly recommended for leadership transitions), I had come to a sense of clarity about some of the key priorities and the changes that I wanted to make. Yet I had a hard time translating them into swift action: it took me months to make some of the changes I had identified in the early days. I think it’s because I wanted to take the time to demonstrate to my team that the changes were not just what I thought, but what was strategically needed, and get their buy-in. That is critical, of course, but I overdid it. Sometimes, a leader just has to lead. I learned that the hard way. As a young leader joining a well-established organization that I had been admiring, I have had to learn the difference between respect and deference, and that it was okay to challenge the way things had been done for years and years. It takes courage and it takes confidence, but some hard conversations cannot be avoided, and some of them we must have with ourselves.4
2. Common Leadership Styles
The business and academic literature have a wealth of material on leadership style. The classic formulations are laid out by the doyen of leadership and emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman.5
His research identifies six common leadership styles:
Coercive leaders demand immediate compliance: “Do what I tell you.”
Authoritative leaders mobilize people toward a vision: “Come with me.”
Affiliative leaders create emotional bonds and harmony: “People come first.”
Democratic leaders build consensus through participation: “What do you think?”
Pacesetting leaders expect excellence and self-direction: “Do as I do, now.”
Coaching leaders develop people for the future: “Try this.”
Research shows that the most effective leaders use a number of these styles—particularly the authoritative, democratic, affiliative, and coaching styles—switching between them as circumstances require. I won’t review all the styles in detail, as they are largely self-explanatory, but I do want to talk briefly about three of particular relevance to nonprofit leadership: authoritative, coercive, and coaching.
The authoritative style is well adapted to purpose-driven leadership. According to Goleman:
The authoritative leader is a visionary; [s/]he motivates people by making clear to them how their work fits into a larger vision for the organization. People who work for such leaders understand that what they do matters and why. Authoritative leadership also maximizes commitment to the organization’s goals and strategy. By framing the individual tasks within a grand vision, the authoritative leader defines standards that revolve around that vision.6
The relevance of an authoritative style of leadership to an organization focused on purpose is clear. I’ve certainly found in my own leadership experience that the ability to motivate staff around our purpose is a powerful mobilizing force: for my team, it’s empowering to know that our work, done well, contributes to people exiting situations of extreme exploitation.
Of course, the risk, particularly for an inexperienced leader, is that an authoritative style too readily veers into a coercive one, often manifesting as a desire to control subordinates. I’ve seen that often in new CEOs (myself included). More often than not, this inclination reflects a lack of confidence rather than excessive self-belief and needs to be kept in check. Even in times of crisis, coercion is of limited use. It is not geared toward achieving sustained results or encouraging commitment.
3. The “Heroic” Leader
A version of coercive leadership too often found at nonprofits is the “hero” or “charismatic” style of leadership. If you have worked for nonprofits long enough, you’ll have encountered this. These leaders bring huge passion and charisma to their roles. They are often founders who have created organizations in their image. But the problem with this style of leadership is that its important strengths—the ability to inspire others and sell a powerful vision—are often undermined by an overwhelming focus on the leader, to the detriment of the organization and its mission. There is nothing wrong with being charismatic about your mission and organization, as long as it doesn’t morph into an undue focus on the self rather than the organization. But often the hero leader thinks that their interests and the organization’s are one and the same, or even that their interests take priority. Such leaders often verge on being narcissistic, and frequently bully subordinates. They demand loyalty and compliance and oppose any questioning of their leadership—all justified by their belief that they know better than anyone else what is in the best interests of the organization.
This style of leadership carries huge risks, because it allows for little or no accountability for the CEO, even when he (and it’s more commonly men) commits abuses—for example, by sexually harassing colleagues, or using organizational funds for his own purposes, or bullying junior staff. Given he is a “hero,” and completely identified with the organization, any questioning of his behavior is regarded as an undermining of the organization.
CASE STUDY
A Hero and His Three Cups of Tea
Greg Mortenson appeared to be the real deal. When he got lost in Pakistan in 1993 while trying to climb K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, he arrived (in his telling) exhausted and emaciated in a desperately poor village called Korphe, where the villagers nursed him back to health. In gratitude, he told them, “I’m going to build you a school.” So started his humanitarian journey.7 The next year he founded the Central Asia Institute (CAI), a nonprofit, which then built a school in Korphe as he had promised and, in the years following, went on to build and support hundreds of schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The work wasn’t risk free— Mortenson reported being kidnapped by Taliban in the remote Tribal Areas of Pakistan on one particularly fraught occasion. In 2006, Mortenson published a moving account of his humanitarian journey and epiphany in a book called Three Cups of Tea. The book was a roaring success, selling about four million copies and spending fifty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It became required reading for US troops being posted to Afghanistan. On the back of the success of the book, Mortenson started touring the US, making hundreds of public appearances in which he promoted the book, his story, and CAI’s mission.8 With all the publicity, CAI raised tens of millions of dollars in the wake of the book’s publication. President Obama donated $100,000 to CAI from the proceeds of his Nobel Prize.
The trouble was that much of Mortenson’s story turned out to be false or, at best, deeply misleading. Exposés in 2011 by 60 Minutes and the prominent writer and former donor to CAI Jon Krakauer were closely followed by an investigation by the Montana Attorney General’s Office. Together they revealed that Mortenson had not ended up in Korphe after an attempt on K2—he went there a year or two later during another visit to Pakistan.9 And the villagers didn’t nurse him back to health, as he wasn’t exhausted or hungry when he visited, allegedly for just a few hours. Nor was he kidnapped by Taliban.10
Even more concerning were allegations of mismanagement of CAI’s operations and finances. It turned out that not all the schools Mortenson boasted of had students; some were being used to store spinach, or hay for livestock; and some had not even been built.11 When it came to its finances, a picture emerged that CAI had paid the costs of producing and publishing Mortenson’s book (about $367,000 in total), and had bought thousands of promotional copies of the book from commercial retailers and given them away. It had also paid the advertising and travel costs for Mortenson’s speaking engagements, including chartering a private jet to fly him around. In four years following the book’s publication, CAI spent about $4 million buying copies of the book and almost $5 million advertising the book and $2 million on private jets. Yet, despite CAI paying millions to publish and promote the book, royalties for the book and many hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees were paid to Mortenson, not CAI.12 This had consequences for CAI’s mission—for example, in 2009, only 41 percent of the money raised went to building schools.13 Throughout this time, Mortenson remained CEO of CAI, and a board member, and received a significant salary from the organization. He resigned as CEO at the end of 2011 and stepped down from the board in 2015.
What lessons can be learned from this sorry tale? One is the power of a charismatic, heroic leader with a hopeful story to tell. As Mortenson himself later observed, “Americans want heroes to believe in. Once the machine kicks in, you can be pretty much anyone, and people will flock to you.”14 If he had used his platform entirely for the benefit of CAI, instead of his personal enrichment, it would have been a more ambiguous morality tale, but that argument falls away in light of him benefiting personally and extensively at the expense of his organization and its mission.
Another lesson is the utter failure of CAI’s board to hold its CEO accountable (complicated by the fact that Mortenson was also a voting member of the board—never a good practice for nonprofit CEOs). Holding the CEO accountable is a common challenge with overly charismatic leaders. In this case, while the board belatedly “recognized and agreed that Mortenson should pay some of the travel and promotional costs associated with his speaking engagements and books, and that he should pay CAI for royalties he received from books purchased by CAI . . . [n]either the board nor Mortenson, however, took steps to implement those agreements.”15
And a third lesson is that this style of overly charismatic leadership will rarely be for the benefit of the community purportedly being served. In fact, the community often operates as a prop for the leader’s efforts at self-promotion. As one observer noted, “[Mortenson is] the hero of his books, and he believes in scale, speed, and the constant need for more money and more construction. He shows no special knowledge of Pakistan or Afghanistan. In fact, he spends very little time in Central Asia.”16
All in all, it’s quite a sad story. Mortenson was clearly committed to supporting education in areas of the world where there was an overwhelming need for it, long before his self-promotion efforts took over his life and undermined his organization’s mission. But his deceptions and CAI’s governance failures did more than just damage its mission; they also exploited the desire of donors and other supporters to believe in hope and a powerful cause—and gave succor to those who seek to undermine the credibility of the nonprofit sector.
4. The Leader as Coach
At the other end of the spectrum from the “heroic” style is the coaching style, which focuses on supporting others, not promoting oneself. The leader-as-coach is rightly, albeit belatedly, receiving a lot more interest these days.17 It is particularly well adapted to the culture of nonprofits. Goleman observed:
Of the six styles, our research found that the coaching style is used least often. Many leaders told us they don’t have the time in this high-pressure economy for the slow and tedious work of teaching people and helping them grow. But after a first session, it takes little or no extra time. Leaders who ignore this style are passing up a powerful tool: its impact on climate and performance are markedly positive . . . Although the coaching style may not scream “bottom-line results,” it delivers them.18
In my development as a leader, I have moved from being overly decisive and insufficiently consultative—as illustrated in the opening story to this chapter—to one who strives to bring more of a coaching approach to my leadership more often. I’m still a work in progress. But when done well, the payoffs are significant, in terms of more highly motivated staff and a more impactful organization. This shouldn’t be surprising in a nonprofit environment, where most staff are driven in whole or in part by a commitment to the cause they serve and can best be supported by encouraging that drive.
So what does a coaching approach mean in practice? For me, it means checking my natural tendency to offer a solution every time a colleague comes to me asking for advice. Instead, I try to ask them questions to get their views on the best way forward, or why they don’t feel they can make a decision or recommendation on this occasion. This leads to much richer discussions, and usually to better outcomes.
More specifically, it means:
Working with your direct reports and other staff to help them identify their strengths and weaknesses, and connecting these with their personal and career aspirations.
Helping them come up with clear goals for their work and a plan to achieve them, and supporting them in doing so.
Embedding a coaching approach into the culture of your organization, along with the values of trust and accountability.19
Being willing to receive and act on lots of feedback from across the organization.
Staying flexible.
Delegating when you can.
