Leading by Design

At your next board meeting look around you.   What would you say the average age of your board is?   Forty?   Fifty?   Sixty?    You’re not alone.   Almost three-quarters of nonprofit boards are comprised of Baby Boomers (those age 46-64), according to BoardSource's Nonprofit Governance Index survey.   Only 2 percent are younger than 30, with almost 30 percent between the ages of 30 and 49. In a recent Nonprofit Times article , Scott Leff of the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management says that attracting young men and women to board service is “fundamental to sustainability.”    Indeed, if an organization fails to do so, the board will age itself out putting its future in jeopardy.   And given the fact that the vast number of current board members will be retiring from board service in the next decade, the nonprofit sector is facing (some argue we're in it right now) a talent drain that, just in sheer numbers, will be difficult to replace. One of the big obstacles is that b...

Linda Norris' Uncataloged Museum blog post on transparency in museums is my impetus to knit together my recent post on measuring success with defining what those measures are. Linda points to the Indianapolis Museum of Art as the site of a great dashboard of measures that welcomes public scrutiny.   In fact, it appears that the museum's dashboard might be the only public museum dashboard -- and it's almost two-and-a-half years old!  The common denominator in all this is museum director Maxwell Anderson, who developed a lexicon of measures to assess organizational health in 2005 -- transparency has been the by-product. This isn't to say that museums and other cultural organizations haven't been tracking data for many years. It's the focus of the data and what's done with it that is different.  Let's talk about focus first.  The Indianapolis Museum of Art tracks activities in 13 broad areas of museum operations.  The resulting data is often quite tigh...

I won't soon forget getting that letter in the mail.  An 80-year old cultural organization was reaching out to members and friends to tell us that its survival was in jeopardy.  It asked for our advice and our financial support.  The first paragraph closed by stating, "Without an immediate and substantial infusion of funds, it appears that we will be required to close our doors while we work to implement a prudent fiscal strategy." A day or two later the news hit the local papers.  And a week or so after that, the director of another cultural called to say that her board was debating the merits of "going public" with their own financial difficulties.  Some thought it might shake loose more support; others were wary of hanging out the dirty linen....or being perceived as the boy who cried wolf. Contrast that with a third organization -- vastly smaller than the other two -- that routinely publishes lengthy pleas for assistance mixed with "the-sky-is-falling...

What's on your top ten list of success indicators for your organization?  I suspect for most of us success has a lot to do with the number of people served -- visitors, members, ticket holders, participants in after-school programs.  Would a balanced budget, meeting or exceeding goal in a fundraising campaign, or growing invested funds be on the list?   As so many cultural nonprofits now struggle for financial and programmatic equilibrium, are the turnstile and the cash drawer alone sufficient -- or even accurate -- indicators of organizational health and future well-being?  What about the importance of an organization's holdings or its positive impact on society?  Would the quality of your organization's work be a success indicator?  How would you measure it? Five years ago, Maxwell L. Anderson, the current  Director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art , took on the topic in his paper for the Getty Leadership Institute titled Metrics for Success in Art Museums.  An...

There's nothing like a crisis to push an organization toward change.  As much as crisis can pull an organization apart, it can also provide opportunities for renewal, focus and healing.  In fact, crisis is a fairly predictable phenomenon that, as it turns out, is a key ingredient for organizational growth.  I have no doubt that, once we're on the other side of this economic crisis, we'll see many nonprofits emerge stronger, more responsive, and more keenly focused on the impact of their missions because they used this interregnum to realign and plan.    There are hundreds of books and articles dedicated to coping with, managing or leading organizational change.  (I happen to be a fan of John Kotter's Leading Change , which is a straightforward prescription for creating an environment in which change is seen as a positive imperative.)  The change agent is usually identified as an individual or a small group of people who see the need for organizational course redirection...

I was one of about 100 women (and one man) in the audience for a presentation on Women in Leadership at this year's American Association of Museums' conference. Central to the discussion was the persistence of the glass ceiling in the museum field despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the museum workforce is female (and they're the majority of museum volunteers and visitors, too). Can you believe that the expression 'the glass ceiling' dates back to 1986? (See below for more on that.) Certainly among high profile museums in the US, the CEOs are male by a ratio of nearly three to one. The tables turn dramatically in mid-sized and small museums, where female directors are routinely found. The session's panelists agreed that women at the top have a real impact on organizational performance. So far, it hasn't been enough to encourage mid-level women to move up. In fact, many women leave their positions within five years due to lack of care...

Lately, I've been knee-deep in thinking about newsletters.  I just spent an afternoon with a client who wants to start a newsletter, so we poured over samples as we contemplated who would receive it, what topics would be covered and how frequently it would be produced.  Less than 24-hours later, I overheard a colleague say that his organization wanted to do a newsletter, but if it couldn't be published quarterly there was no point in doing one.   I've also got one to assemble for my association this week. Judging from the number of hard-copy and electronic newsletters my association receives each month, it would not be an understatement to say that they continue to be the communications backbone of most nonprofits.  These little bundles offer insights about an organization's work, build cases for support, promote programs, and acknowledge the involvement of the community.  They are the prolific example of how organizations "reach out and touch someone", even a...