Remerciez-le!

Remerciez @Admin pour avoir partagé cet document gratuitement, de la manière la plus simple, en partageant sur les réseaux sociaux.

Executive Directors Guide The Guide for Successful Nonprofit Management LEADERS

Executive Directors Guide The Guide for Successful Nonprofit Management LEADERSHIP A Four-Step Approach Participatory, Partnership-Based Leadership Keeping Your Balance Strategies for Maintaining Your Balance Written by: Deborah Linnell Zora Radosevich Jonathan Spack TSNE MissionWorks Published by: United Way of Massachusetts Bay Partners in social change Published by 89 South Street Suite 700, Boston MA 02111 617.523.6565 phone 617.523.2070 fax www.tsne.org To purchase this book or request reprint permission please contact TSNE MissionWorks directly at 89 South Street Suite 700, Boston MA 02111 or email eguide@tsne.org Copyright © 2002 United Way of Massachusetts Bay All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Acknowledgements We would like to thank the many nonprofit organizations and leaders who helped us frame the scope and content of the Guide through their willingness to respond to surveys, serve on our Practitioners Advisory Group, review chapters and provide other expertise or assistance as needed. In particular, we would like to thank Martha Breunig, Ray Considine, Deborah DeBare, Diane D'Errico, Joanne Donoghue, James Earley, Jim Haskell, Karen Jeffreys, Kathy Jellison, Bruce MacDonald, Denise K. Maguire, Francine Mantak, John Pearson, Charlotte Ryan, Bob Sable, Surl Silberman, Joyce Strom, Jon Thompson, and Judith E.Wise, CGSE. Finally, we would like to thank Marilyn Anderson Chase and Carlos Martinez of the United Way of Massachusetts Bay for making this Guide possible. Deborah Linnell Zora Radosevich Jonathan Spack A Four-Step Approach Participatory, Partnership-Based Leadership Keeping Your Balance Strategies for Maintaining Your Balance LEADERSHIP C H A P T E R 1 “The best leaders operate in four dimensions: vision, reality, ethics, and courage. . . The real challenge of leadership is to develop all four of these often-contradictory modes of thinking and behaving at once.” – Philosopher Peter Koestenbaum, interview in Fast Company, March 2000 1 A Four-Step Approach Unlike many of the subjects covered in this guide, leadership can’t be learned from a book. Effective leadership is in large part a matter of personal values, choices, commitments, and characteristics – tempered by experience. Much as we would like to believe otherwise, not everyone has what it takes to be a leader. However, if you have the right raw mate- rial to begin with, it is possible to become a better leader by reading and reﬂecting on the latest research and best thinking on the subject and by putting into practice the ideas that resonate for you. We suggest a four-step approach to leadership enlightenment and growth: Deﬁne it for yourself. The above quotes from Bennis and Block offer radically different views of leader- ship. In fact, Block eschews the word altogether, preferring the more democratic “stewardship.” The way you envision your role as executive director (your “mental model”) shapes everything you do, from your relationship with your board, staff, and funders to the way your budget is put together; even the physical layout of your ofﬁce space can be affected by the way you think of your role in rela- tion to other staff and the organization as a whole. Do you have a clear enough mental model of your role as a leader to write it down in one or two declarative sentences? Try it here: My role as the leader of my organization is to _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ Was it hard to do? Was your description closer to Bennis or Block? We admit to a bias; we are strong believers in the stewardship model articulated by Peter Block. We think it’s the model best suited to twenty-ﬁrst-century realities where the ability to adapt and make rapid responses to change will be a necessity for every organization’s survival. It is very difﬁcult for an organization to be ﬂexible and adaptable if power and decision-making are concen- trated at the top, no matter how open-minded the person at the top may be. S o much has been written on the subject of leadership (including, inevitably, Leadership for Dummies), that to try to cover the topic comprehensively in one, brief chapter is an impossible task. (A recent article in the Harvard Business Review asserts that 2,000 books on leadership were published in 1999). So we won’t try. Instead, we address what we believe are the critical leadership issues for executive directors of nonproﬁt organizations, including: • demystifying the concept of leadership and presenting a simple model for understanding it; • stimulating readers to think about their own leadership competencies and styles; • encouraging self-reﬂection; and • making a case for participatory, partnership-based leadership, where decision-making authority is distributed throughout the organization. To give you an idea of the range of opinion on this topic, consider these opposing quotes from two noted authors: “Vision is the commodity of leaders, and power is their currency.” – Warren Bennis, author of numerous books on leadership “The belief that crafting the vision is primarily a leadership-at-the-top function defeats, right at the beginning, the intent of driving ownership and responsibility toward those close to the work…” – Peter Block, consultant and author (Flawless Consulting, The Empowered Manager, Stewardship) L e a d e r s h i p 3 2 Evaluate yourself. As a leader, where do you fall on the spectrum of styles and characteristics? How do you even know what this spectrum looks like? A great deal of information is available to anyone with the time to immerse himself or herself in the litera- ture. We recommend taking the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, the Learning Styles Inventory or some other assessment tool. Read some of the scores of books on leadership. A study1 conducted by the consulting ﬁrm Hay/McBer identiﬁes six distinct leadership styles and analyzes their effectiveness in creating a positive working environment and yielding good ﬁnancial results. The following table presents the chief characteristics of the six styles of leadership. Leadership Style Chief Characteristic Authoritarian Demands compliance Afﬁliative Creates harmony, builds emotional bonds Democratic Forges consensus through participation Authoritative Mobilizes people towards a vision Pacesetting Sets high standards for performance Coaching Develops people for the future According to the study, the authoritative, afﬁliative, democratic, and coaching styles were considered effective in promoting a positive work environment and yielding good ﬁnancial results. The best leaders were those who had mastered all six of these styles and could draw on any one of them when appropri- ate. The key point is that good leaders can adjust their leadership style as needed and are sensitive to the impact they are having on others. Make a choice. Ask yourself what kind of leader you want to be. Ask what style of leadership will help you grow as a person and help your organization reach toward its mission and vision. Develop a vision for yourself as a leader and commit yourself to working toward it. Remember the fundamental rule: you must be authentic to be an effective leader in the long term. If you try to emulate someone else, even one of the many leaders who have written books describing their own wonderful successes, you will be heading in the wrong direction. Another Perspective on Leadership Qualities Another perspective on leadership qualities was recently offered by Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones2, who claim to have identiﬁed four qualities that deﬁne inspirational leadership. Their work, which assumes that the basic elements of vision, author- ity, energy, and strategic direction are already present, concludes that inspirational leaders: • selectively show weakness in order to establish trust and authenticity (Authors’ note: the reality of gender bias suggests to us that this strategy will work better for male leaders than for female leaders.); • use instinct and intuition to sense the appropriate timing and course of actions; • use “tough empathy,” by which they mean balancing respect for the individual with respect for the task at hand; and • demonstrate unique qualities to create the distance necessary for effective motivation of others. 3 C h a p t e r 1 : L e a d e r s h i p 1The Study, conducted by the consulting ﬁrm Hay/McBer, was analyzed in Daniel Goleman’s article “Emotional Intelligence,” Harvard Business Review, March-April 2000. The table was drawn from information presented in the same article. 2See Goffee, Robert and Jones, Gareth, “Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?” Harvard Business Review, (September-October 2000): 63-70. 4 Create a plan and put it to work. Make a step-by-step plan of what you must do to realize your vision of leadership. Try not to censor your own thinking. Here are a few ideas to use in developing your plan, but remember, each element in the plan should move you towards the leadership vision you have articulated for yourself: • Listen more and talk less. • Take a vacation. • Take a course on ﬁnancial management. • Immerse yourself in the leadership literature. • Share information – and the nitty-gritty details of your decision-making process – with other staff members more regularly. • Take more interest in the opinions – and problems – of your coworkers. • Delegate more tasks. • Find uploads/Management/ executive-directors-guide.pdf