The Impending Leadership Deficit Crisis
Mark Light, president of First Light Group LLC, and his brother, Paul, a professor at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, discuss the so-called “leadership deficit.”
Dear Mark,
I know you’ve seen most of the new research on the coming leadership crisis in the nonprofit sector, the most prominent of which comes from Thomas Tierney and the Bridgespan Group. According to Tierney, we’re going to be short 80,000 executives by 2016, largely because of the continued growth in the number of nonprofits and the impending retirements of the baby boomers.
The numbers rightly capture the coming generational transition to younger leaders. Baby boomers are working on getting older every day—even if they don’t acknowledge it. Plus, we know that nonprofits are popping up regularly. The barriers to entry into the sector are so low that anyone can form a nonprofit—even you.
Dear Paul,
I don’t quite get the urgency. I admit that the number of estimated openings is scary, but this looks like déjà vu all over again. After all, during the 10-year period from 1993 to 2003, we added about 100,000 new senior executives —20,000 more than Tierney says we’ll need in 2016.
More important, by focusing on 2016, it gives us an excuse to take our eyes off the present and look toward the future, where it is so much easier to sleep at night. So, (1) I do not believe there is an impending leadership crisis, and (2) even if there were such a crisis, the best way to deal with it is to help those who currently work in the sector to work longer and better [through leadership development].
And relative to your comment about low entry to the sector, I might point out that I was an executive director of a $2 million nonprofit before I was 30. And that’s in stark contrast to the notion that the prime leadership age is 34 to 54. According to your own studies, nearly three out of ten small organization executive directors were younger than 40. That’s going to be the case in the future. What’s the big deal?
Mark,
The coming leadership deficit will force us to hire more and more young people at a time when we need more experience dealing with greater competition and uncertainty. Although every generation fears for the future and thinks that younger leaders won’t be able to take the stress or understand the complexity, somehow they always do.
At a minimum, the focus on leadership vacancies forces us to confront the reality that we’re going to see a major generational shift in the coming years. We simply have to ask whether the pool of potential leaders is sufficient to produce enough qualified executives to fill the vacancies. And that means we have to ask whether we either have too many nonprofits or not enough leaders.
Paul,
Young leaders and small organizations go together. Younger leaders get a priceless opportunity to learn in these settings, and often move up to the larger organizations, where the vacancies are growing.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to be thinking about the future, but I don’t want to forget what’s going on today . . . like the fact that the median tenure of nonprofit executive directors is just four years, or that only one in six executive directors immediately goes on to another top job, and that ultimately just one in three takes on a second stint. Can you imagine what it would mean if we changed that number to two in three?
Mark,
I’m a big believer in helping nonprofits get through the here-and-now, and I complain constantly about the lack of investment in building effective organizations. And I believe we’re not spending enough time grappling with why anyone would want to become a nonprofit executive given the current state of our organizations.
The sector may be the destination of choice for many of America’s most talented young people, but they quickly see the devastation caused by under-investment in organizational capacity, which I believe reflects a persistent sense among funders that there are just too many nonprofits out there. Perhaps we ought to be talking about how to hold down the numbers of new nonprofits as the potential solution to the leadership deficit.
Paul,
You appear to forget that even though the causes of nonprofit executive transition have not been deeply investigated, we do have some indicators both for forced and voluntary leaving. A study of nonprofit hospitals in the ’90s found leadership instability significantly associated with life-cycle stage and board executive relations.
Of course, board relations is also cited by executive directors as one of the top reasons for leaving voluntarily. The other reasons are burnout, better career opportunities, and the proverbial pay and benefits. Who knows what other factors may be behind these stated concerns.
Mark,
So, nonprofit leadership transition is a problem! We have a great deal of work to do on a host of issues. For my part, as a former executive and wanna-be academic, the biggest challenge is training the next generation of leaders for the changing nonprofit world. Most teaching focuses on how to keep body and soul together in a much more competitive funding environment and how to design effective programs. But we don’t do enough about how to be a successful leader in this particular environment.
That’s something we ought to focus on as soon as possible. Although the baby boomers are not going to leave all on the same day, we are going to retire eventually. Put the retirements together with the continued growth in the sector, and I maintain that we have something bordering on crisis.
Paul,
On the existence of “the crisis of executive transition,” we may just have to disagree. But if you want to hold to your position, maybe there should be less hyped-up talk about replacing leaders and more thoughtful discussion about making nonprofit leadership a more tenable proposition right now.
Dear Mark,
I know you’ve seen most of the new research on the coming leadership crisis in the nonprofit sector, the most prominent of which comes from Thomas Tierney and the Bridgespan Group. According to Tierney, we’re going to be short 80,000 executives by 2016, largely because of the continued growth in the number of nonprofits and the impending retirements of the baby boomers.
The numbers rightly capture the coming generational transition to younger leaders. Baby boomers are working on getting older every day—even if they don’t acknowledge it. Plus, we know that nonprofits are popping up regularly. The barriers to entry into the sector are so low that anyone can form a nonprofit—even you.
Dear Paul,
I don’t quite get the urgency. I admit that the number of estimated openings is scary, but this looks like déjà vu all over again. After all, during the 10-year period from 1993 to 2003, we added about 100,000 new senior executives —20,000 more than Tierney says we’ll need in 2016.
More important, by focusing on 2016, it gives us an excuse to take our eyes off the present and look toward the future, where it is so much easier to sleep at night. So, (1) I do not believe there is an impending leadership crisis, and (2) even if there were such a crisis, the best way to deal with it is to help those who currently work in the sector to work longer and better [through leadership development].
And relative to your comment about low entry to the sector, I might point out that I was an executive director of a $2 million nonprofit before I was 30. And that’s in stark contrast to the notion that the prime leadership age is 34 to 54. According to your own studies, nearly three out of ten small organization executive directors were younger than 40. That’s going to be the case in the future. What’s the big deal?
Mark,
The coming leadership deficit will force us to hire more and more young people at a time when we need more experience dealing with greater competition and uncertainty. Although every generation fears for the future and thinks that younger leaders won’t be able to take the stress or understand the complexity, somehow they always do.
At a minimum, the focus on leadership vacancies forces us to confront the reality that we’re going to see a major generational shift in the coming years. We simply have to ask whether the pool of potential leaders is sufficient to produce enough qualified executives to fill the vacancies. And that means we have to ask whether we either have too many nonprofits or not enough leaders.
Paul,
Young leaders and small organizations go together. Younger leaders get a priceless opportunity to learn in these settings, and often move up to the larger organizations, where the vacancies are growing.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to be thinking about the future, but I don’t want to forget what’s going on today . . . like the fact that the median tenure of nonprofit executive directors is just four years, or that only one in six executive directors immediately goes on to another top job, and that ultimately just one in three takes on a second stint. Can you imagine what it would mean if we changed that number to two in three?
Mark,
I’m a big believer in helping nonprofits get through the here-and-now, and I complain constantly about the lack of investment in building effective organizations. And I believe we’re not spending enough time grappling with why anyone would want to become a nonprofit executive given the current state of our organizations.
The sector may be the destination of choice for many of America’s most talented young people, but they quickly see the devastation caused by under-investment in organizational capacity, which I believe reflects a persistent sense among funders that there are just too many nonprofits out there. Perhaps we ought to be talking about how to hold down the numbers of new nonprofits as the potential solution to the leadership deficit.
Paul,
You appear to forget that even though the causes of nonprofit executive transition have not been deeply investigated, we do have some indicators both for forced and voluntary leaving. A study of nonprofit hospitals in the ’90s found leadership instability significantly associated with life-cycle stage and board executive relations.
Of course, board relations is also cited by executive directors as one of the top reasons for leaving voluntarily. The other reasons are burnout, better career opportunities, and the proverbial pay and benefits. Who knows what other factors may be behind these stated concerns.
Mark,
So, nonprofit leadership transition is a problem! We have a great deal of work to do on a host of issues. For my part, as a former executive and wanna-be academic, the biggest challenge is training the next generation of leaders for the changing nonprofit world. Most teaching focuses on how to keep body and soul together in a much more competitive funding environment and how to design effective programs. But we don’t do enough about how to be a successful leader in this particular environment.
That’s something we ought to focus on as soon as possible. Although the baby boomers are not going to leave all on the same day, we are going to retire eventually. Put the retirements together with the continued growth in the sector, and I maintain that we have something bordering on crisis.
Paul,
On the existence of “the crisis of executive transition,” we may just have to disagree. But if you want to hold to your position, maybe there should be less hyped-up talk about replacing leaders and more thoughtful discussion about making nonprofit leadership a more tenable proposition right now.
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