Community Building: Lessons from the Business Sector on Nonprofit Leadership Development

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The nonprofit sector’s underinvestment in talent development is not news to anyone. All too often, training is categorized as a luxury, rather than a necessity. The limited training dollars that do exist are often spent at the top of the organization, with C-level executives going to classes in wood-trimmed classrooms far from the everyday realities of their organizations. The best for-profit training programs emphasize that training is needed at every level of the organization, and this same principle should be applied to the nonprofit sector. In the coming decade, we must train and develop not just the next generation of nonprofit leaders, but the next two or three generations. And given the unlikelihood of training budgets dramatically expanding, we have to find new ways of developing tomorrow’s leaders using creativity and resources from outside of the individual organization—perhaps in part by leveraging volunteer and intellectual assets from the private sector in new and creative ways.

For example, at New Sector, we match highly motivated, socially aware AmeriCorps members with high-performing nonprofits that need help with a specific capacity-building project—for example, better measuring internal performance, creating a volunteer program or using technology to better meet community needs. Our training curriculum provides more than 150 hours of practical, hands-on training over the course of a year, and is taught by local nonprofit experts and business volunteers. Each AmeriCorps member is matched with a volunteer from a local management consulting firm who provides an additional hour of one-on-one coaching and mentoring each week. Because of our reliance on skilled volunteers, we can deliver a rigorous and in-depth development and coaching experience to the most junior team members for less than $1,000 per full-year AmeriCorps member.

Another innovative way a nonprofit is developing leaders at all levels of the organization is the Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model (SAM), a partnership of New Visions for Public Schools and Baruch College. School principals are typically sent, alone and somewhat self-appointed, away from their school setting to become certified as school leaders. In SAM, a team of faculty members working on real school issues gain certification as school leaders. Rather than having participants study journal articles in a university setting, in SAM, groups from different levels in the school organization work together to study their own school—and judge their success by their capacity to improve student outcomes.

Many of SAM’s approaches would not feel out of place in a business or in a business school. For example, the central activity of the curriculum is that teams of participants use data to proactively identify which students are drifting off track, what the barriers to success are and how struggling students can be brought back on track. Their rigorous use of data to drive school performance and everyday classroom practice is already being adopted in other schools. SAM trains all participants to become more comfortable in using data, and uses that shared comfort as a vehicle for each participant to grow as a leader.

Simply saying that we need to increase nonprofits’ training budgets will not get us where we need to go. The nonprofit sector can learn from businesses that prioritize and invest in leadership development at all levels of the organization, and bring its own resourcefulness and creativity. Even if we will never be able to spend as much on training as the for-profit sector, businesses can provide skilled volunteer coaches, trainers and intellectual assets, and preferentially support nonprofits that prioritize talent development throughout the organization. Just as nonprofit leaders have innovated new ways to address social challenges, so too must we innovate new ways to get around the challenge of limited resources, and invest in the vital work of developing the next two or three generations of nonprofit talent.