All of this has shaped my thinking on what great nonprofit leadership is. The starting point is to identify what the most successful nonprofits have in common. Once we identify this, we can explore the leader’s role in building and sustaining these organizations.

Nonprofits come in many forms. They are service-delivery organizations, advocacy organizations, charities, foundations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), religious organizations, social welfare organizations, and education and arts institutions. There are more than 1.5 million registered nonprofits in the US and millions more globally. Given this diversity, it’s not surprising that many factors contribute to nonprofit success—starting with leadership, but also including staff, culture, the issue being addressed, operational context, funding models, and peers and competitors.

But all highly successful nonprofits put purpose and impact at the very heart of everything they do, and they maintain a disciplined and relentless focus on them. Nonprofits exist to make a positive change in our world. This is their purpose, their reason for existence. Their contribution to that change is their impact. They save lives, protect rights, tackle poverty and hunger, promote the arts, provide education and health services to the world’s least fortunate, and much more. Some nonprofits have more impact than others, and definitions of “positive change” can vary widely, but all have purpose and impact as the golden thread running through all their work.

The power of this approach can best be seen by comparing nonprofits with businesses. Businesses exist to maximize value for their shareholders—that is their principal purpose and how their impact is measured by their shareholders. Successful businesses are defined primarily by their financial returns. Some may have a secondary purpose of doing public good, but financial considerations reign supreme, and that strongly shapes their leadership and differentiates it in important ways from nonprofit leadership.^* By contrast, the most effective nonprofits start and end with a focus on change—and understanding this is key to understanding nonprofit leadership.

THE ROLE OF THE LEADER

Given this focus on driving change, what is the role of the leader in building and sustaining great nonprofits? Many (particularly business leaders) argue that the key is to lead nonprofits more like businesses, but this entirely misses the point. The simple fact of leading a profit-driven organization does not, of itself, make you a good leader. There are well-led businesses and badly run ones, just like there are great nonprofits and mediocre ones. One of the world’s leading experts on business leadership, Jim Collins, highlighted this by subtitling his study on nonprofit leadership: “why business thinking is not the answer.”

Rather, the role of the leader is to harness the power of purpose and use it to shape everything the organization does—internally with its people and externally with its partners—to deliver the greatest possible change.

The framework I use in this book reflects this approach. It is structured around purpose, people, and partners:

Purpose determines a nonprofit’s direction of travel and destination. It explains why a nonprofit exists and what it hopes to achieve. The first section of this book will explore “purpose” in detail and the way it shapes mission, impact, and strategy, with a chapter on each.

People are central to the success of any organization. The second section of this book looks internally, at the people and dynamics that power a nonprofit. It starts with a chapter on the CEO’s priorities and style. Next comes a chapter on teams—specifically culture and staffing—followed by one on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The section ends with a chapter on another key group of people, namely your board.

Partners are key to amplifying a nonprofit’s impact. Nonprofits have a range of groups with an interest in their success: these are their external stakeholders or, as I prefer to call them, their partners. The book’s final section looks at the role of these partners. It starts with a chapter on the individuals and communities you serve, as these are the principal reason for your organization’s existence. Next come your funders, who provide the financial fuel on which your organization depends. The last chapter is on collaboration and networks.

At the end of each chapter, I’ve compiled a short list of “action points.” Think of them as a succinct summary of the chapter and the key takeaways.

WHY THIS BOOK?

In writing this book, I was conscious that there is no shortage of literature on leadership. But almost all of it is about running businesses. And, while much of what is written about profit-driven leadership is relevant to nonprofits, there are fundamental differences between the two types of organizations, which means that business literature and experience will never be sufficient to address the needs of nonprofit leaders. This is why successful business leaders can do poorly in leading nonprofits, and why effective nonprofit leaders can stumble when they try and move to private-sector leadership positions.

Despite these differences or, rather, because of them, I regularly compare business and nonprofit practice throughout this book. The contrast illustrates how different incentives lead to different priorities and outcomes, and better shapes our understanding of nonprofit leadership.

There are some very good, and weighty, academic books about nonprofit leadership and the attributes of successful nonprofits. But being largely academic in their approach, they tend to be of limited use to the busy nonprofit leader looking for clear and practical advice on strengthening their leadership and organization.^*

How to Lead Nonprofits is written specifically for that busy nonprofit leader, be they a CEO, executive director, board chair, prospective leader, or aspirational one. For convenience, I will often refer to the CEO, but the intended audience is broader than that.^*

Throughout the book, I have drawn heavily on my own experiences over the last twenty years. In so doing, I’m conscious that those experiences have been strongly influenced by the fact that I’m a middle-class white man who has spent most of his working life in the US, UK, Europe, and Australia. So, in addition to referring to the relevant literature, I have also sought out the wisdom of a number of outstanding nonprofit leaders from around the world that I’ve had the joy of working and collaborating with over the years. My hope is that collectively we can help other nonprofit leaders accelerate some of the learning process and more effectively build impactful and inclusive organizations.

This is meant to be the kind of book I would have found helpful when I started working in nonprofit leadership roles. I’ve aimed to keep the text short and practical. While the book is structured around the framework of purpose, people, and partners, the chapters are all freestanding. So, if you are more focused on, say, culture than mission, feel free to dive straight into the relevant chapter. The book is intended to be a resource that you can use as and when it suits you. And I don’t expect you to agree with everything I have to say—my approach is not to be prescriptive but rather to provide an informed perspective against which you can form your own views.

In short, my objective is to provide you with the tools to become a great nonprofit leader as you strive to make the world a better place.

^* I served first on the board of the Sail Training Association of Western Australia (see the Purpose section in this book) in the 1990s. I’ve since served on the boards of Crisis Action (as chair), Girls Not Brides, the Jo Cox Foundation (as chair), and Transparentem. I currently serve on the advisory board of Global Witness, a passionate and powerful campaigning organization that takes on governments and companies to protect human rights and secure the future of our planet. I’m also a member of the human-trafficking advisory council of the US-based McCain Institute, founded by former Senator John McCain and Ambassador Cindy McCain.

^* B Corporations are notable exceptions to this model of profit-driven company. They are for-profit companies that meet the highest standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. Effectively, they are mission-driven companies that balance purpose and profit. To become a B Corp, companies must go through an extensive certification process. There are over six thousand certified B Corporations in more than eighty countries and over 150 industries. To learn more, see “What’s Behind the B,” B Lab website, accessed July 18, 2023, https://usca.bcorporation.net/about-b-corps/; Suntae Kim, Matthew J. Karlesky, Christopher G. Myers, and Todd Schifeling, “Why Companies Are Becoming B Corporations,” Harvard Business Review, June 17, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/06/why-companies-are-becoming-b-corporations.

^* The exception that proves the rule is the excellent monograph on nonprofit leadership by the leading business researcher and author Jim Collins, titled Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking Is Not the Answer (London, England: Random House Business Books, 2006)—a text I have returned to repeatedly in my nonprofit career.

^* Leaders of nonprofits are often called CEO or executive director, and sometimes president and CEO. I’ll generally use CEO in this book.

PURPOSE

Set the Direction

Let us make our future now, and let us make our dreams tomorrow’s reality.

—Malala Yousafzai¹

I was twenty years old the first time I worked for a nonprofit, though I didn’t think of it as such at the time. The “nonprofit” took the form of a 180-foot tall ship, with three masts, sixteen sails, and fifty-five crew members—it was a bit like the pirate ships of old. The ship was called the Leeuwin and was run by the Sail Training Association of Western Australia (STAWA).^* We would take forty high school and university-age, often disadvantaged, youth out for ten-day ocean voyages during which they would confront challenges ranging from howling gales to seasickness to cramped communal cabins. They would be trained to work as teams (called “watches”), to build confidence, character, and leadership skills. I volunteered during my holidays. I was a “watch-leader,” in charge of one of those teams, and part of the ship’s leadership. The experience was often transformative for those who participated. It certainly was for me, given the responsibility of leading teams of eight to ten young people at an early age.

I was keen to contribute more to the work of the organization, so, a few years after I first sailed on the Leeuwin, I became a board member of STAWA. I had recently qualified as a lawyer, and my hope was to contribute to the organization’s governance. This was my first real introduction to nonprofit leadership. The organization’s declared purpose was to “enrich the lives of young people,” and it aimed to do this through “adventure, participation, and the challenge of sailing a purpose-built Tall Ship.”² Like so many small nonprofits (this one had a full-time staff of eight, along with an army of volunteers), it was focused on keeping the doors open and serving the youth of Western Australia. We had a mission statement and a fairly straightforward strategy, though it wasn’t written down in the form of a strategic plan. We measured impact by counting how many young people sailed on the Leeuwin each year, with lots of anecdotal stories of individual transformation.

STAWA’s approach to strategy and impact measurement was rudimentary. But the organization was always true to its purpose of enriching the lives of young people. And it was always clear on how it would do that—through the adventure of sailing on a tall ship. As a result, STAWA has had a deep and lasting impact on over forty thousand young people who have sailed on the Leeuwin over the last thirty-five years. It’s also become an important part of the social fabric of Fremantle, the port town where it is based. My experiences with Leeuwin and STAWA are my nonprofit North Star, always reminding me that when purpose and impact are at the heart of a nonprofit, its work can transform lives.

Because nonprofits pursue positive change rather than financial returns, they have developed other concepts to guide what they do and how— namely, vision, purpose, mission, and impact. These concepts all derive from the organization’s purpose, i.e., its reason for existence. Nonprofits usually have an overarching vision—the long-term picture of what they’d like to achieve. Their mission is the action they take to fulfill their purpose and achieve their vision. Their impact is the positive change they contribute to in pursuit of their purpose. Their strategy is their practical road map to turning their purpose into impact. And all of these elements are usually pulled together in a strategic plan.

The leader’s role is to ensure that the organization’s purpose is powerfully reflected in its mission, impact, and strategy, and that’s what we will explore in this section. As Dina Sherif, CEO of the Legatum Center at MIT, put it to me, “Know your organization’s purpose. That will always be your lifeline.”³

While this discussion can sometimes seem a little technical, understanding these concepts is important because, properly applied, they set organizations on the path to achieving the greatest possible impact.

^* Now called Leeuwin Ocean Adventure Foundation.

CHAPTER 1

Mission

Be Clear About the Work

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of human history.

—Mahatma Gandhi¹

Staying true to mission requires nonprofits to maintain constant focus. Even the most professional ones sometimes get sidetracked, as I experienced during my time with the International Crisis Group (“Crisis Group”).

Crisis Group is one of the world’s preeminent conflict prevention organizations. Its purpose is to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts. Established during the Balkans war in the 1990s by foreign policy experts appalled at the failure of the international community to respond effectively to such a brutal conflict, it quickly earned a reputation for its impactful mission—producing deeply knowledgeable and nuanced policy-focused reports from analysts based in the conflict zones they covered, combined with high-level advocacy to Western policymakers. Its board of former senior government officials and policymakers—which over the years have included several Nobel Peace laureates and scores of former prime ministers and foreign ministers—helped it get access to the right decision-makers.

From its early years, Crisis Group covered the civil wars in Sudan, including in Darfur, where mass atrocities were being committed against the region’s non-Arab population. As former US Secretary of State Colin Powell noted, “In Darfur . . . International Crisis Group was ringing the alarm bell . . . They gave us insight. We didn’t always agree with them. It’s not their role to come into agreement with us. It’s their role to reflect ground truth.”²

In 2006, a bold new US human rights foundation, Humanity United, launched an activist campaign to pressure US policymakers to do more to prevent genocide and other mass atrocities, with a particular focus on the war in Darfur. The foundation called this campaign the Enough Project and backed it with an $8 million grant over five years. The campaign would involve a partnership between Crisis Group (providing field-based research and analysis) and the DC-based think tank Center for American Progress (providing US advocacy expertise).³

Crisis Group gratefully accepted its sizable share of the grant without fully thinking through how the campaign would fit with its mission, and the Enough Project launched in March 2007. At the time, I was vice president of Crisis Group with overall responsibility for our operations, including advocacy and fundraising. Dazzled by the generosity of the grant, on an issue we were deeply engaged in, we did not consider whether conducting grassroots activism was consistent with our core focus on complex policy formulation and advocacy to high-level policymakers.

As quickly became apparent, it was not. In fact, the situation was a textbook case of mission creep. Activist campaigning requires clear and strident calls for action—such as imposing a no-fly zone (the enforcement of which requires the shooting down of the target country’s military planes, and which effectively amounts to a declaration of war)—aimed at mobilizing concerned members of the public. In contrast, high-level policy advocacy usually requires a more nuanced articulation of the drivers of the conflict and the ways to influence them, directly targeting policymakers and other officials. Both are critically important, but they don’t always work easily together, and certainly not when coming from the same organization. Moreover, our close involvement in the activist campaign was undermining the effectiveness of our advocacy to high-level policymakers, who were confused by the mixed messages. It was also causing discord within Crisis Group, particularly with some of our experts on the ground in Africa who fundamentally disagreed with much of the activist messaging. While we understood public-facing activism to be critical to political change, we came to realize that we weren’t the right organization to be doing it. The Enough campaigning was dragging us off mission.

We decided that this could only be resolved by recommitting to our core mission of high-level advocacy. In May 2007, we agreed to part ways with the Enough Project.⁴ The staff leading that work left to work for Center for American progress, before setting up their own organization—and all the funding moved with them. The transition was not straightforward, and there was a degree of unhappiness on the part of those staff leaving, and at Humanity United, which stopped funding Crisis Group for a number of years. That said, the longer-term outcome was that Crisis Group returned to a laser-like focus on what it did best, and the Enough Project became a highly successful and impactful organization in its own right, under the leadership of my former colleague John Prendergast and with the high-profile backing of committed celebrity activists such as George Clooney and Don Cheadle. And, over time, we rebuilt a strong and productive relationship with Humanity United.

Understanding mission is key to understanding nonprofits. While purpose is their “why,” mission is their “how.” Nonprofits are often called “mission-driven” organizations because success is judged on their impact in delivering their mission. Much follows from this framing, especially when it comes to working out whether the organization is achieving its desired change.