How is your staff doing right now? …How are you doing right now?

Everything we’re hearing from our colleagues and clients these days seems to indicate that burn out and stress are at record levels. This time of the year is an incredibly stressful time both personally and professionally for those in the nonprofit space. Reconciling expenses with budgets at year-end and doing strategic planning for the year ahead have always been causes of headaches for staff and leadership. However, when employees are already stretched thin in their roles and burdened by fundraising worries, this stress can take a bigger toll and derail the organization’s effectiveness in achieving its mission.

Chances are, you’ve heard this quote before: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.”
It’s a quote that is often associated with sports (and just as often misattributed to Aristotle instead of its original author Will Durant, but that’s beside the point). If you ask any elite athlete, they’ll tell you that this insight is absolutely true! The continual practice of their skills, attitude, knowledge, and commitment to excellence are big drivers to success in their sport.

Having worked extensively in nonprofit leadership over my career, I have seen this apply to boards as well. I believe if you ask any effective nonprofit board, they too will say their ongoing practice of skills, attitude, knowledge, and commitment are the keys to good board governance, which helps to make their organizations great.  

The relationship between a nonprofit Executive Director (ED) and Board Chair is a unique one, which is why they should have their own “training day.” Find out how setting time aside to work together one-on-one can benefit the organization they both serve!

If you’re a sports fan, you probably understand what I mean when a refer to the concept of a training day but let me offer a story from many years ago to provide some broader context. When my daughter was just a teenager, I arrived at her fastpitch softball practice. I looked around and she was nowhere in sight. I came to realize she’d been right in front of me the whole time, but she was covered in catcher’s gear so I didn’t even realize it was her. I soon learned from the coach that both the starting and back-up catchers were unavailable for the weekend tournament. So, they asked my daughter if she would be the catcher because they felt she had the best ability to command the field. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but she did great! Fast forward to a month later and the catching gear remained, but it had been adjusted to fit better. She grew into being a good backup catcher and, although it wasn’t her permanent position, it was a great learning experience for her that she carried into her college softball playing days.

Through this experience I started understanding that being a catcher is more than just catching the ball behind the plate. The catcher is a leader (calling plays on the field) and a key strategic partner with the pitcher (in leading the game and the team).
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Behind every good pitcher is a good catcher – someone who has a certain way about her to mentally and physically help and challenge her pitcher. A pitcher who knows to respect and trust her catcher’s instincts while being direct about what she needs from her catcher is often the key to winning. The same can be said about the Board Chair and ED relationship!

Today we’re sitting down with Ed Rogan, Partner and Search Practice Leader here at Valtas, to discuss forming a search committee for your Executive Director (ED) search. He is going to share some nonprofit search committee best practices from his more than two decades of experience in connecting people with missions to help you be better prepared for finding a new ED to lead your organization.
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Our hope is that you will use this as a sort of “search committee formation FAQ” to get your most pressing questions answered, but if you still have questions at the end, please reach out to Ed directly to get those answered in a way that’s customized to your organization’s specific needs. Let’s get started!

As a nonprofit Executive Director, Board President, or Director of Development balancing fundraising challenges is becoming more difficult as the giving landscape continues to change. Nonprofit leadership is asking questions like:

• How can we continue receiving the funding we need to operate when giving is down compared to previous years?
• Where can we find new supporters for our mission, outreach efforts, and programs?
• Are our old fundraising methods still going to work in the future, or do we need to take a new approach?
• What are top organizations doing and what can we learn from them?
• How can we think about fundraising more holistically to better align our efforts? ​

​In our line of work, we talk to nonprofit leaders every day that are making career moves. Some are entering executive leadership roles for the first time after putting in their time on boards or in mid-level managerial roles. Some are seasoned nonprofit leaders that are making lateral moves from the helm of one organization to another. Some are coming over from executive leadership roles in industry to the nonprofit sector.

But regardless of where they’re coming from, they enter the role bright-faced and optimistic about their future with the organization. They are excited, ambitious, and ready to succeed!
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There’s just one problem... They can’t succeed alone!

Every new Executive Director placement brings an individual with a unique set of skills and experiences into an organization with unique needs and goals. To effectively unite the two, the organization’s board and existing leadership team needs to provide their new ED with everything that they need to find success. 

The idea of shared leadership has always been around in some form or another in the nonprofit space for years. However, nonprofit co-leadership across the entire sector gained popularity as a concept 5-10 years ago, and we continue to see some organizations choose this format today. Since its heyday conversation around whether it’s a worthwhile concept seems to have faded somewhat into the backdrop behind other more pressing nonprofit topics like decreasing philanthropy funding, diversity, pay transparency, and unionization. And yet, because “distributed leadership” is such a vague term we can’t say organizations are altogether done with it these days because it can mean different things to different organizations in different circumstances.
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Let’s look at where it’s still being used and why, as well as who is most likely to embrace it!