Leaders for the Future

1

• Leaders for the Future
• A Discussion led by Barbara Kibbe

• Board Meeting
• April 8, 2003

2
Individual and Group Reweaving the Social Fabric

• An understanding of the mutual dependence of
  individual and group has existed below the level
  of consciousness in all healthy communities from
  the beginning of time. But that understanding
  survives faintly if at all today No society can
  survive such abandonment by its members Ideally
  one fosters individual initiative but expects
  that a certain amount of that initiative will be
  expended on shared purposes To make this
  possible, we shall first have to rehabilitate the
  idea of commitments beyond the self Passive
  allegiance isnt enough today. The forces of
  disintegration have gained steadily and will
  prevail unless individuals see themselves as
  having a positive duty to nurture their community
  and continuously reweave the social fabric.
• Building Community
• John Gardner

3
Choosing Service

• The antidote to self-interest is to commit and to
  find cause. To commit to something outside of
  ourselves. To be part of creating something we
  care about so that we can endure the sacrifice,
  risk, and adventure that commitment entails. This
  is the deeper meaning of service.
• Stewardship
• Peter Block

4
The Social Sector Nonprofits and Philanthropy

• Characteristics and Challenges

5
Essential Features of Nonprofits

• Attempting to define the fundamental features of
  the disparate entities that constitute the
  nonprofit and voluntary sector is a complex and
  daunting task. Yet there are at least three
  features that connect these widely divergent
  entities
• they do not coerce participation
• They operate without distributing profits to
  shareholders and
• They exist without simple and clear lines of
  ownership and accountability
• these structural features give these entities a
  set of unique
• advantages that position them to perform
  important societal functions
• neither government nor the market is able to
  match.
• On Being Nonprofit
• Peter Frumkin

6
Justification for the Social Sector

• Nonprofit and voluntary action is an important
  instrument for the accomplishment of tasks that
  communities view as important
• and
• The sector can be seen as valuable because it
  allows individuals to express their values and
  commitment through work, volunteer activities,
  and donations
• The managerial challenge, of course, is to bring
  the expressive and instrumental dimensions into
  alignment
• On Being Nonprofit
• Peter Frumkin

7
Daunting Challenges

• Nonprofit America has confronted a difficult set
  of challenges over the recent past. Fiscal
  stress, increased competition, rapidly changing
  technology, and new accountability expectations
  have significantly expanded the pressures under
  which these organizations must work, and this has
  affected the public support these organizations
  enjoy and their ability to attract and hold
  staff.
• Nonprofit organizations find themselves in a
  time of testing at presentthe challenges are
  especially daunting, since they go to the heart
  of the sectors operations and raise questions
  about its very existence.
• The State of Nonprofit America
• Lester M. Salamon

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Leaders of the Future

• What kind of leader is needed?

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Focus on Relationships

• For those interested in what makes any
  organization function effectively, trust and
  strong personal relationships have become a focal
  pointTrust, or social capital is the reservoir
  of good will that organizations need when
  standard operating procedures do not provide an
  answer.
• On Being Nonprofit
• Peter Frumkin

10
Serve Others

• Leadership is a reciprocal relationship between
  those who choose to lead and those who decide to
  follow. Any discussion of leadership must attend
  to the dynamics of this relationship. Strategies,
  tactics, skills, and practices are empty unless
  we understand the fundamental human aspirations
  that connect leaders and constituents. If there
  is no underlying need for the relationship, then
  there is no need for leaders The new approach
  to leadership is one characterized by serving
  others rather than being served
• Credibility
• James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner

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Deal with Emotions

• Throughout history and in cultures everywhere,
  the leader in any human group has been the one to
  whom others look for assurance and clarity when
  facing uncertainty or threat, or when theres a
  job to be done. The leader acts as the groups
  emotional guide.
• Primal Leadership
• Daniel Goleman

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Think Politically

• One of the distinguishing qualities of successful
  people who lead in any field is the emphasis they
  place on personal relationships The critical
  resource is access, and so the greatest care is
  govern to creating and nurturing networks of
  people whom they can call on, work with, and
  engage in addressing the issue at hand.
• Leadership on the Line
• Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky

13
Develop Cultural Competency

• In the next decade well be looking for cultural
  competency that goes beyond manners being
  rooted in your own values to where you can
  comfortably hear someones differences. Ethical
  pluralism is a competency.
• Whats Next?
• The Global Business Network
• Jay Ogilvy

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Practice Intrapreneurship

• The organizations of the future will be
  communities of intrapreneurs. They will be
  structured from many smaller interacting
  enterprises, more like the market structure of a
  free nation than that of a totalitarian system.
  .. The new organizations will be pluralistic to
  the core, preferring conflict between competing
  points of view and the struggle of competing
  suppliers to the illusory security of
  bureaucratic command and internal monopolies of
  function As the complexity of any organization
  reaches beyond the grasp of direct leadership,
  the leaders central role becomes that of
  contributing to the corporate culture and
  corporate institutions that make freedom work and
  that create a freer society within the
  organization.
• The Leader of the Future
• The Drucker Foundation
• Gifford Pinchot

15
Create the Conditions for Success

• It is impossible to overstate the importance of
  the leader in the high performing organization
  Leadership is deeply intertwined with mission In
  essence, the nonprofit leader must create the
  conditions for others to succeed as follows
• Foster open communications
• Motivate people
• Fundraise
• Clarify board/staff relationships
• Embrace participation
• Pathways to Nonprofit Excellence
• Paul Light

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Collaborate

• The process of collaborative problem solving may
  be set in motion by any influential individual or
  group within the community. But once initiated it
  is best kept in motion by leaders of a particular
  kind. They are facilitators who see themselves
  as guardians of a process a continuing
  conversation among disparate , sometimes hostile
  participants an interaction that builds trust
  and credibility. They bring all stakeholders to
  the table, teach them to work together, energize
  them and then keep them motivated through
  difficult periods. They do not seek to control
  the substantive outcomes of the discussion.
• National Renewal
• John Gardner

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Learn, and Then Learn More

• To thrive under conditions of change, you have to
  be learning all the time One of the
  characteristics of this kind of situation where
  you have to adapt and learn all the time is a
  need to move toward placing a greater value on
  listening and the realization that we cant
  control all of this complex process of change
  More and more corporate structures are taking
  account of this, so that you have people at the
  top who value their own capacity to learn and to
  listen rather than assume that they are there to
  lay down the law.
• Whats Next?
• The Global Business Network
• Mary Catherine Bateson

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Charisma Not Required

• A high-profile, charismatic style is absolutely
  not required to successfully shape a visionary
  company Some of the most significant chief
  executives in the history of visionary companies
  did not have the personality traits of the
  archetypal high-profile, charismatic, visionary
  leader.
• Built to Last
• James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras

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Challenges Ahead

• Implications and Opportunities

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The Potential of the New Global Generation

• I am both hopeful and puzzled by the new
  generation hopeful because they are supple and
  flexible and their minds are more scientific in a
  sense puzzled because they dont have much
  content in their minds They are truly global.
  They see things from so many perspectives. Its
  not just relativism, its multi-tracking they
  can have different versions of the world in their
  heads at the same time. They also have multiple
  personalities going playing games on line in
  which they have different identities with
  different groups of people This is simply the
  most neutral generation I have ever seen and
  also the one with the most capacity. Watch out!
  They have such wide peripheral vision they were
  designed for this world.
• Whats Next?
• The Global Business Network
• Betty Sue Flowers

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The Future of Philanthropy

• While some form of giving outside the family has
  existed as long as humans have, organized
  philanthropy is still a young field, now at a
  critical stage in its evolution The waves of new
  energy and ideas entering the field will run
  inevitably into enduring barriers to change and
  will confront unprecedented demands facing those
  who want to use private resources for the public
  good.
• Without new leadership, the cumulative effects
  of current approaches to increasing
  philanthropys effectiveness will not produce
  dramatic improvements. They are far more likely
  to lead to drift and long-term, relative decline.
• -Discovering Philanthropy in the 21st Century
• Global Business Network

22
Supply or Demand?

• The idea of a demand-driven nonprofit and
  voluntary sector dominates much of the research
  that is conducted in this field. Yet the
  demand-side approach captures but one aspect of
  this broad social phenomenon. Al alternative,
  supply-side position argues that the sector is
  impelled by the resources and ideas that flow
  into it resources and ideas that come from
  social entrepreneurs, donors, and volunteers.
• the supply-side perspective holds that nonprofit
  and voluntary organizations are really all about
  the people with resources and commitment who fire
  the engine of nonprofit and voluntary action.
• On Being Nonprofit
• Peter Frumkin

23
Balance

• There are four underlying functions of the
  nonprofit and voluntary sector encouraging civic
  and political engagement, delivering needed
  services, enacting private values and religious
  convictions, and providing a channel for social
  entrepreneurship.
• The sector cannot survive and garner financial,
  political, and volunteer support if it swings too
  far in the direction of any particular function.
• On Being Nonprofit
• Peter Frumkin

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Balance

• Ultimately, it is the diversity of purposes and
  rationales embodied in nonprofit and voluntary
  organizations that make them increasingly visible
  and exciting vehicles for the pursuit of common
  social goals. And it is the sectors diversity
  and flexibility that may well help nonprofit
  organizations to solve some of the pressing
  challenges they now confront
• On Being Nonprofit
• Peter Frumkin

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Leadership is Dangerous

• The toughest problems that groups and communities
  face are hard precisely because the group or
  community will not authorize anyone to push then
  to address those problems. To the contrary, the
  rules, organizational culture and norms, standard
  operating procedures, and economic incentives
  regularly discourage people from facing the
  hardest questions and making the most difficult
  choices Leadership requires disturbing people
  but at a rate they can absorb.
• Leadership on the Line
• Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky

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Leaders? Where?

• The dearth of leadership is apparent throughout
  society. No matter where we turn, we see a severe
  lack of faith in the leadership of our schools,
  religious organizations, and governments if
  Martians descended someplace in the United States
  and demanded that we take them to our leaders, we
  would have to think twice about where to take
  them This leadership crisis is in reality a
  leadership development crisis.
• The Leader of the Future
• The Drucker Foundation
• James F. Bolt

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Cultivate Alchemists

• Alchemists dont react to events, they want to
  shape them, to make a difference. And alchemists
  have three essential characteristics
• They are passionate
• They have the ability to leap beyond the rational
  and logical and to stick with their dream
• They look at things differently
• The Elephant and the Flea
• Charles Handy

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Questions for Discussion

• Is there an opportunity for the Skoll Foundation
  to address the leadership development crisis in
  the social sector?
• How is Skolls current grantmaking addressing the
  leadership needs of the social sector?
• Who is currently developing leaders and social
  entrepreneurs? What is missing from these
  current approaches?
• Who is capable of doing this work? How can we
  help them?
• How can the Skoll Foundation be a leader in the
  social sector?