The Quickening Drumbeat of Institutions in Trouble

I've been involved with cultural institutions -- namely historic house museums and historical societies -- all my adult life. Most of these institutions, as most smaller nonprofits in general, live with an ebb and flow of income. Perhaps I should say that most live -- even thrive -- in spite of the ebb and flow of income that is peculiar to nonprofit life.

The best nonprofit leadership is always thinking about tomorrow and how it will be paid for. Building reserves, expanding or fine-tuning income streams, balancing the level of debt or deficit with potential for growth -- these are stock in trade of the nonprofit executive and governing board.

So, now we find ourselves in an environment where the global economic crisis has settled into our communities and found its way to the doorstep of our nonprofits. And it's starting to expose or magnify pre-existing weaknesses in organizational infrastructures. Crises have a way of doing that, whether it's in business or private life.

I think if we were to ask every nonprofit executive and every nonprofit board member where their organization's Achilles heel is, we'd get an answer. We know our weaknesses -- perhaps not to the depth of what we should know about them -- but we know. Times of crisis force us (most of us, at any rate) to own up to what we know. For some organizations, we own up too late.

A week doesn't seem to go by now when we don't hear about another nonprofit in crisis. Opera companies closing, museum exhibitions scaled back, employees laid off; others paralyzed by fear -- no money, no answers. As much as this particular crisis is exposing the weaknesses within cultural institutions, it is also exposing the weaknesses of the agencies that regulate them. Aside from the fact that there is (practically) no government money to assist cultural institutions in trouble, there is not much else either. No apparent expertise to help with restructuring or developing new models for economic stability, no training opportunities, no safety net. We knew that anyway, didn't we?

I feel as though the drumbeat of cultural institutions is quickening...and it's coming to a nonprofit near you.

Photo: loneliness by zipildak from flickr

Back in the Saddle

MY LAST POST WAS NOVEMBER 2012, A LIGHT YEAR AWAY it seems, that marked the beginning of a long push toward completing a manuscript on history museum leadership with my co-author, Joan Baldwin. We finally submitted 350+ pages to our editor at Rowman & Littlefield this week. If all goes well, we expect the book to be available in early 2014. It's taken us two years to get to this point, so six more months or so of revision and production don't seem too long to wait until we can hold the final product in our hands (and you can, too!). The project put a lot of things on hold, including this blog. I'm glad to be back writing about intentional leadership -- leading by design -- for nonprofit boards and staffs. Certainly, my thoughts are now informed by the forthcoming book, in which Joan and I posit that nonprofits need to focus resources on leadership, not just management. Most cultural nonprofits are at a crossroad, as is the sector in general, where nothing is qu

Change for Your Board in 2010: A Polling Update

WE'RE A DAY INTO MY LAST POLL (SEE RIGHT) AND the responses are clustering in two areas: 1) removing dead wood from the board and 2) using better/different tools to make decisions/evaluate performance. There are still six days left for your colleagues to cast their vote! In the meantime, those of you who are in need of tools for decision-making might want to check my posts on taking stock here , here and here .

Three Most Important Nonprofit Executive Director Soft Skills

If you were asked to narrow down the list of executive director qualifications to the three most important, which ones would you identify? Would the list consist of soft skills, hard skills, or some combination? Would your list be based on the great ED you are or one you've worked for, or would it be your wish list for the ED you haven't been fortunate yet to work for? This was an assignment in my recent online class in leadership and administration for the American Association for State and Local History . I asked the class to review three-five advertisements for museum directors and analyze what these listings intimated about the organization’s past experience, current focus and goals, and future aspirations. Then, I asked the class to identify what they consider to be the three most important qualifications they would look for in a director. (Okay, so there's more than three if you dissect my three big groups.) Soft skills outnumbered hard skills, although

Leading by Design

Search This Blog