Leadership Deficit in Nonprofits: Challenges & Opportunities

Leadership

The lack of strong leadership is one of the biggest challenges facing nonprofits today – a which is going to get worse as the sector expands and baby boom executives retire. Nonprofit organizations – foundations, associations, NGOs, institutions, public and semi public agencies, joint ventures and even corporate foundations – depend on two resources to accomplish their missions. One of them is money. The other one, perhaps even more scarce, is leadership.

Read complete article, by Juan Algar (Spanish version)

As a matter of fact, qualified leadership candidates may be even more rare than six-figure donors. As one renowned executive director recently observed, “If I have the choice between spending time with a 100,000 Euros donor or a candidate for a senior role, no doubt I’ll choose to meet the candidate.”

Today, many nonprofit organizations urgently need to attract and retain the talented senior executives capable of converting resources into effective social impact.

Within the next 10 years, the leadership deficit will become impossible to ignore; nonprofits will have to engage in-depth analysis to manage the replacement of retired senior executives, while becoming aware of a problem which is not considered a priority due to the “scarcity of resources”.

To put the challenge in perspective, the demand for executives in the nonprofit sector will be the equivalent of recruiting more than 50 percent of every MBA graduating class, at every university, every year for the next decade.

Read complete article, by Juan Algar (Spanish version)