Nonprofit Leaders Quotes

The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission.

You don’t have to know all the answers, you just need to know where to find them. —Albert Einstein

As we lead organizations—businesses, nonprofits, and churches—size doesn’t matter as much as another crucial factor. The biggest difference between leaders of large organizations and small organizations isn’t their location, the size of their building, the scope of the vision, the number of staff members, or their talent. In fact, some of the best leaders I’ve ever met have small organizations. But in all my consulting and conferences, I’ve seen a single factor: leaders of larger organizations have proven they can handle more pain.

in my name to train young women for global leadership. Wellesley’s twelfth and thirteenth presidents, Diana Chapman Walsh and Kim Bottomly, embraced the idea and, over several years, helped put the pieces together. In January 2010, I traveled to Massachusetts for the inaugural session. The Albright Institute was founded on the belief that a student doesn’t have to major in international relations to have a global mind-set. By giving young women the chance to work in partnership with peers from a variety of disciplines and countries, we encourage them to see differences of perspective as a strength and even as a tool to help solve complex problems. To that end, we provide an intense course of study over a three-week period between the fall and spring semesters, complemented by summer internships. Of the hundreds of Wellesley juniors and seniors who apply annually, forty are selected. In the first two weeks of each session, we offer classes run by professors, former government officials, nonprofit leaders, and businesspeople. During the final seven days, the fellows work in teams to analyze and make recommendations regarding a thorny international problem. At the end, they present their findings, which we pick apart and discuss.

After high school, he’d passed two relatively laid-back years as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia, where by his own account he’d behaved nothing like a college boy set loose in 1980s Manhattan and instead lived like a sixteenth-century mountain hermit, reading lofty works of literature and philosophy in a grimy apartment on 109th Street, writing bad poetry, and fasting on Sundays. We laughed about all of it, swapping stories about our backgrounds and what led us to the law. Barack was serious without being self-serious. He was breezy in his manner but powerful in his mind. It was a strange, stirring combination. Surprising to me, too, was how well he knew Chicago. Barack was the first person I’d met at Sidley who had spent time in the barbershops, barbecue joints, and Bible-thumping black parishes of the Far South Side. Before going to law school, he’d worked in Chicago for three years as a community organizer, earning $12,000 a year from a nonprofit that bound together a coalition of churches. His task was to help rebuild neighborhoods and bring back jobs. As he described it, it had been two parts frustration to one part reward: He’d spend weeks planning a community meeting, only to have a dozen people show up. His efforts were scoffed at by union leaders and picked apart by black folks and white folks alike. Yet over time, he’d won a few incremental victories, and this seemed to encourage him. He was in law school, he explained, because grassroots organizing had shown him that meaningful societal change required not just the work of the people on the ground but stronger policies and governmental action as well. Despite my resistance to the hype that had preceded him, I found myself admiring Barack for both his self-assuredness and his earnest demeanor. He was refreshing, unconventional, and weirdly elegant.

Despite being a nonprofit, we have been able to build a team that rivals those of the most resource-rich tech companies. Hundreds of incredibly talented people have committed a major part of their careers to be part of the Khan Academy team, often taking considerable pay cuts to do so. Thousands of volunteers all over the world have now translated Khan Academy into over fifty languages. Inspirational leaders like Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, and Elon Musk have become some of our biggest supporters and advocates. This journey seems so serendipitous that it has become something of an inside joke among the Khan Academy team that perhaps benevolent aliens are helping us so that, through education, we can prepare humanity for first contact.

In 2000, for instance, two statisticians were hired by the YMCA—one of the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations—to use the powers of data-driven fortune-telling to make the world a healthier place. The YMCA has more than 2,600 branches in the United States, most of them gyms and community centers. About a decade ago, the organization’s leaders began worrying about how to stay competitive. They asked a social scientist and a mathematician—Bill Lazarus and Dean Abbott—for help. The two men gathered data from more than 150,000 YMCA member satisfaction surveys that had been collected over the years and started looking for patterns. At that point, the accepted wisdom among YMCA executives was that people wanted fancy exercise equipment and sparkling, modern facilities. The YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios. When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else. Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names.

A vast nonprofit-industrial complex and elite racial leadership class has arisen since the 1960s to define the parameters of acceptable political action and debate. As riots and rebellions return to the United States, the dominant praxis of contemporary anti-oppression politics has largely refused to question the alienated governance structures that create the need for "race leaders" in the first place rather than already-existing popular assemblies and other forms of decentralized decision making, within and when needed, between groups directly attacked by antiblack state violence, rape and sexual assault, deportations, surveillance, and extreme racial inequality. Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012. Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides.

A viable future isn’t possible until the past is faced objectively and communion is made with our errant history.

It may be in the ubiquitous phenomenon of terrorism that one can most easily see how universal emotional processes transcend the conventional categories of the social science construction of reality. According to the latter, families are different from nations, profit-making corporations are different from nonprofit corporations, medical institutions are different from school systems, one nation’s infrastructure is different from another’s, and so on. Yet whether we are considering any family, any institution, or any nation, for terrorism to hold sway the same three emotional prerequisites must always persist in that relationship system.    There must be a sense that no one is in charge—in other words, the overall emotional atmosphere must convey that there is no leader with “nerve.”    The system must be vulnerable to a hostage situation. That is, its leaders must be hamstrung by a vulnerability of their own, a vulnerability to which the terrorist—whether a bomber, a client, an employee, or a child—is always exquisitely sensitive.    There must be among both the leaders and those they lead an unreasonable faith in “being reasonable.” From an emotional process view of leadership, whether we are talking about families or the family of nations, these three emotional characteristics of a system are the differences that count.

International leaders in business, government, and nonprofit organizations whisper behind closed doors about the way visiting Americans live in their own bubbles without having much genuine interaction with their overseas counterparts, much less the locals. One senior foreign policy advisor told Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, “When we meet with American officials, they talk and we listen—we rarely disagree or speak frankly because they simply can't take it in.”13 Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former foreign secretary and ambassador to the United Nations, put it this way: “There are two sets of conversations, one with Americans in the room and one without.”14

In 2005, nonprofits employed 12.9 million people, approximately 9.7% of the U.S. economy, and they employed more people than the construction (7.3 million), finance and insurance (5.8 million), and real estate (2.0 million) sectors.

An aligned organization is impossible to achieve if the strategy is not clear, because strategy is the endpoint to which the rest of the organization is directed. When leaders set about to align their organizations, they often discover that they are not resolved about their strategy. They may be very clear about their financial targets. They may have precise numbers representing their growth plans. They may be sure of the capital initiatives and other initiatives they have planned to pursue in the short- or long-term. But if your team cannot exactly articulate why customers choose you over others—or in the case of nonprofit organizations, what your beneficiaries rely on you to do that no one else does for them—then you are not yet capable of alignment. Everyone on the executive team and beyond should be able to state in explicit terms how you intend to be unique in customers' eyes.

About the Bacharach Leadership Group: Training for Pragmatic Leadership™ “Vision without execution is hallucination.”—Thomas Edison The litmus test of pragmatic leadership is results. The Bacharach Leadership Group (BLG) focuses on the skills necessary to lead and move agendas. Whether in corporations, nonprofits, universities, or entrepreneurial start-ups, BLG instructors train leaders in the core competencies necessary to execute change and innovation. At all levels of the organization, leaders must master ideation skills for innovation, political skills for moving change, negotiation skills for building support, coaching skills for engagement, and team leadership skills for going the distance. The BLG approach: 1. ASSESSMENT BLG will assess your organizational challenges and leadership needs. 2. ALIGNMENT BLG will align its training solutions with your organization’s challenges and culture. 3. TRAINING BLG training includes options for mixed-modality delivery, interactive activities, and collaboration with an emphasis on application. 4. OWNERSHIP BLG provides continuous follow-up, access to the exclusive BLG mobile apps library, and coaching. Whether delivering a complete leadership academy or a specific program or workshop, BLG will partner with you to get the results you need. To keep up to date with the BLG perspective, visit blg-lead.com or contact us at info@blg-lead.com.

The most challenging governance issue always entails ensuring that the organization remains on task, generating profits if a for-profit or fulfilling its mission if a nonprofit. That means maintaining organizational focus, minimizing the potential for malfeasance (wrongdoing on the part of the organization or its leaders), and raising the costs of fraud or theft within the organization.

Business school students seem to be particularly narcissistic, an important fact because many leaders in both the for-profit and the nonprofit world come from business school backgrounds, particularly in the more recent past.

The leader beyond the millennium will not be the leader who has learned the lessons of how to do.... The leader of today and the future will be focused on how to be ... how to develop quality, character, mind-set, values, principles, and courage. —Frances Hesselbein

on a task usually also want the authority

The church is the only nonprofit on the planet that does not want its leader to know everything he or she can about how the nonprofit functions and pays its bills.

Mara Foundation is the nonprofit side of Mara’s business, a social enterprise focused on emerging entrepreneurs. We have myriad programs designed to address the complete life cycle of an entrepreneur’s business idea, from start-up advice right through to venture capital. My sister Rona, the foundation director, has been a dynamic force in ongoing advocacy for youth and women in business. Always someone with a keen eye for detail, she has secured partnerships for the Foundation with Ernst & Young to nurture and develop small and medium entrepreneurs (SMEs) in Africa and with UN Women, whose UN Women’s Knowledge Gateway for Women’s Economic Empowerment has operations in 80 countries. A spin-off of this is a program called Mara Mentor—tagline: Enable, Empower and Inspire—an online community that connects budding entrepreneurs with experienced and inspiring business leaders around the world.

We need far too many leaders to depend only on the naturals.

Leaders and managers appreciate it when employees take the initiative to offer help, build networks, gather new knowledge, and seek feedback. But there’s one form of initiative that gets penalized: speaking up with suggestions. In one study across manufacturing, service, retail, and nonprofit settings, the more frequently employees voiced ideas and concerns upward, the less likely they were to receive raises and promotions over a two-year period. And

For more than a century, experiments by innovators and studies and reports produced by nonprofits, learned academies, universities, and federal agencies have continued to suggest that dental hygienists, particularly with additional training, could be more widely used to help address the unmet dental needs of millions of Americans. Hygienist leaders agree.

Local power is also the realm of the small nonprofit, church, and civic association. A handful of people, properly organized, can drive enormous changes in a city’s dynamics. I’ll offer yet another example from Portland, Oregon. A group of water-conservation enthusiasts, frustrated at the illegal status of graywater reuse in the city and state, formed an organization called Recode. Although many in the group were young, among them they had built solid relationships with a number of local officials, business leaders, and other key people in the politics of the area. Recode pooled their respective connections to gather together relevant stakeholders, such as health officials, state legislature staff, the plumbing board, and developers. To the surprise of all, everyone at the meeting supported graywater use. So, everyone wondered, what was up? A state legislature staffer in attendance zeroed in on the main obstacle: There was no provision in the state codes for graywater. Legally, all of Oregon’s water fell into one of two categories, potable water or sewage. Since graywater was not potable, it had to be considered sewage. The staffer told them, “So, all we need to do is create a third water category, graywater.” They drafted a resolution doing that, got it to their state representative, and it passed at the next legislative session. After three subsequent years of bureaucratic wrangling and gentle pressure from Recode, graywater use became legal in Oregon. Recode then tackled urban composting toilets as their next target for legalization.

...nonprofit leadership is more challenging than leading a for-profit company of similar size and complexity. The primary reason for this is differences in the clarity of organizational objectives.

Something interesting and exciting happens when you begin contributing as a leader. You move from working in an organization to working on it...Whether you have a leadership title or not, when you begin working on your organization, you begin your journey as a leader.

This, in turn, only reinforces the unrealistically low assumptions that kicked off the cycle in the first place. And so the cycle repeats itself. Over time, funders expect grantees to do more and more with less and less. These leadership and funding challenges intersect in troubling ways. Nonprofit leaders are typically under relentless pressure to raise money to support existing programs and, if they are truly fortunate, to innovate, improve, and do more. As a result, they’re perpetually in “sell mode,” externally focused and intent on persuading people to contribute their money, time, and influence. Even the most successful nonprofits usually have to raise the funds for each year’s operating budget anew. Their leaders never forget that if they come up short in that effort, the organization’s very existence may be imperiled.

the best workplace learning and performance leaders are always open to ideas for the next learning opportunity they need to oversee, and they work hard to avoid being hindered by obstacles.

Wilhelm Meya - An American Social Entrepreneur Wilhelm Meya is an American social entrepreneur and international nonprofit leader. He is renowned for his work preserving and protecting endangered indigenous languages. As Founder & CEO of The Language Conservancy (TLC), he has grown a network of over a dozen related organizations that work to support endangered languages and build linguistic capacity & infrastructure. Mr. Meya has worked hard to forge numerous alliances between his organization and governmental agencies as well as educational institutions.

to your direct reports you are the most important leader in your organization. … The leaders who have the most influence on people are those who are the closest to them,” they write. “You have to challenge the myth that leadership is about position and power.”2

Many leaders still regard the private sector with skepticism—an attitude inherited from the old “New Left.” They fear that they might lose focus or be co-opted if they partner with corporations. Some nonprofits play a corporate watchdog role and protest the excesses of capitalism and globalization—often for good reason. And a recent spate of corporate scandals hasn’t helped improve the image of business. “Among many nonprofits, there is a view that business is the enemy,” says Mike McCurry, who is on the board of Share Our Strength. On the other side of this debate, more pragmatic members of the social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility movements have long touted the benefits of cross-sector partnerships and of harnessing market forces for social change. They argue that companies’ bottom lines can benefit from social responsibility, while nonprofits

Covert narcissists will often have careers that are impressive. They can be pastors, spiritual leaders, therapists, and heads of non-profit organizations. They can be politicians who are charming, look you right in the eye, and really seem to care.

Pressure to conform: Nonprofit leaders feel pressure to conform to funders’ unrealistic expectations by spending as little as possible on overhead, and by reporting lower-than-actual overhead rates.

Sales leaders know that everything I’m describing in this book applies to them, too. The private sector is way ahead of nonprofits in this regard, which makes sense. Their profit model financially motivates them—their CEOs, managers, and salespeople—to crack the code on what truly works and what doesn’t. If they don’t, their investors seek change. In the 21st century, your investors (your donors) will, too.

According to the nonprofit organization Greenleaf founded, “the key tools for a servant-leader [include] listening, persuasion, access to intuition and foresight, use of language, and pragmatic measurements of outcomes.

Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner talks about the foresight of right-wing funders such as Richard Scaife, who saw the importance of political education. “Right-wing victories,” he notes, “started more than twenty years ago when Dick Scaife had the vision to see the need for a conservative intellectual movement in America.…These organizations built the intellectual case that was necessary before political leaders like Newt Gingrich could translate their ideas into practical political alternatives.

In his germinal work, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, reprinted in part in this anthology, Allen documents how the Ford Foundation’s support of certain Black civil rights and Black Power organizations such as CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) actually helped shift the movement’s emphasis—through the recruitment of key movement leaders—from liberation to Black capitalism.

Not satisfied with the status quo, fundraising leaders are change makers – they see ahead to what the organization could accomplish to fulfill its mission and set a path toward attaining it. They are influencers in the best sense of the word as they draw upon their communication skills to share their vision for the future.

From the start, Obama’s adversaries on the religious right—from officials of the Catholic Church to leaders of antichoice organizations to evangelical celebrities—portrayed Obamacare as a socialist takeover that would force taxpayers to pay for coverage of abortion services. That was not true, but it proved a potent talking point, priming the base for outrage when the Obama administration, in early 2012, finalized a regulation under the act requiring employer-sponsored health plans to cover contraception without a copay. Even after the Obama administration exempted houses of worship from the requirement and offered religious nonprofits an “accommodation” that permitted them to opt out by signing a form that would put the onus of coverage on their insurers, the regulation triggered a series of overheated, Republican-led congressional hearings, activist protests, and years of protracted litigation.

To be sure, many large, public companies have also been molded by their communities. Walmart is a product of Bentonville, Arkansas, and Hershey’s is a product of Hershey, Pennsylvania. For that matter, Target and H. B. Fuller are just as much products of the Twin Cities as Reell. What was different was the intimacy of the connections. A human-scale company in a single location can be part of a community without dominating it. The CEO and other top managers can establish personal relationships with the company’s neighbors, with leaders of local nonprofits, with the rest of the business community, and with government officials. There’s a focus, an intensity, a depth of commitment that inevitably becomes harder to maintain as the business expands. That was what Weinzweig meant by being “rooted.

We formed the idea for what is now Fearless Faith Ministries that day over lunch. We chose the name because Beth had faced death fearlessly. Today, we have a relatively large following on our Facebook page @FFM60. The name of the page is Fearless Faith Ministries. The three of us take turns delivering three-minute messages every morning. We call these messages “Your Morning Cup of Inspiration.” Fearless Faith is a nonprofit 501(c) 3 corporation. A portion of the proceeds from this book will help us continue to minister in exciting new ways, as do the donations from our supporters and followers. God continues to open other doors of ministry to us, including radio and television. Our primary goal is to point people to Jesus. We believe that He is the answer to the problems that plague humanity today. We are not about religion. Jesus condemned the religious leaders of his time for their hypocrisy. He said they were “whited sepulchers,” meaning that they were all cleaned up on the outside, but they were dead on the inside. Fearless Faith is about spreading the gospel, or the Good News, that we can have a relationship with God. Our central message is that anyone can have eternal life by simply asking God to forgive their sins and by accepting the gift of atonement that Jesus provided through his death and resurrection. We believe that Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life” as He said in John 14:6, King James Version of the Bible.

I know from personal experience and the vast amount of available research on emotional intelligence that people who can understand and manage their own and others’ emotions make better leaders. Leaders who possess a high level of emotional intelligence recognize and regulate their behavior, embrace open communication and show a greater ability to adapt to different work situations. They are also able to express empathy for others and collaborate more effectively with their executive team members and their boards.

The second component is accountability. Because the Bible instructs us to “confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed,” we must be willing to confront or be confronted by one another when we exhibit unhealthy patterns. Furthermore, we must be inclined to submit ourselves to the authority of not just our leaders but our peers. You see, our community’s prayer life is directly connected to our shared life. We can only pray for and bear together the burdens we know about. Independence isn’t the path to freedom but to captivity. Autonomy isn’t the way to painlessness but to quiet suffering. If you don’t have accountability, you don’t have community. How many divorces would have been prevented if people were in true community? How many suicides would have been stopped? How many cries for help would have been heard? How many bankruptcies would have been avoided? How many affairs would have been evaded? How many needs would have been met? Now, there’s nothing more stressful than trying to solve a problem that has no solution. So where do you go from here? How can you find biblical community? How can you begin pursuing a life of real Christian relationships? You have two options: you either plant it or find it. You either seek God’s navigation for your life and ask Him to reveal the remnants of counter-cultural, biblical communities that are scattered across the world, or you create it. Now as many of you know, it’s just about impossible to create something you’ve never experienced. That’s why Veronica and I have chosen to devote the rest of our lives to helping people find this. If you’re interested in learning more, consider our nonprofit program at UnlearnChurch.org.

In the early twentieth century, when John D. Rockefeller was petitioning Congress for a charter to create the first foundation, a top nonprofit leader of that time, Edward Devine, argued the charter should only be granted if public officials had some say over the selection of board members. The idea never went anywhere and has rarely been raised since. Foundations answer only to themselves.

Dr. Larry Poland of Mastermedia International, a nonprofit ministry to cultural influencers in Hollywood, often talks about how Christians try to repair the moral decay in the media by boycotting, writing letters, and protesting. Though well-intentioned, those techniques usually cause media leaders to see Christians as people who hate them and only care about having them clean up their act. Dr. Poland practices a different perspective on being “fishers of men.” He says, “It’s our job to catch them; it’s God’s job to clean them.

As a result, a core competency of today’s nonprofit leader is the ability to build trusting relationships. Leaders who can bring out the best in others and make people feel their voices, concerns and actions matter are most likely to build successful organizations.

Joe could see that the CDC wasn’t going to solve the problem. But there was a solution: the United States was by far the world’s leader in microbiology research. It contained thousands of microbiology labs, run by private companies and universities and nonprofits, like the one he presided over at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. The thing to do, Joe decided, was to transform the Biohub into a COVID-19 testing center as quickly as possible—

information about PTC and to find a leader in your area, call Jean McFalls at 503-413-8018 or e-mail caregiver@lhs.org. PTC is offered collaboratively by many nonprofit organizations such as AARP, Area Agencies

Modern wargaming—what we and our colleagues do for our clients in the military, large corporations, and nonprofit organizations around the globe—differs in one essential way: The participants do not have complete information when they play one of our wargames because we design wargames to reflect the real world; in the real world, decision makers almost always are forced to make choices that are based on incomplete information. An economist, Thomas Schelling, got a Nobel Prize in 2005 for his work applying game theory to the interactions of people and nations. A central point of his "impossibility theorem" states: "One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.