I had the opportunity to interview Marc Pitman, CEO of Concord Leadership Group to discuss nonprofit leadership styles and what they could mean to you and your organization.
What type of nonprofit leader are you? Watch this interview to learn the four different types of leadership, and how they impact fundraising and the future of your organization.
The Nonprofit Leadership Report referred herein was sponsored by the Concord Leadership Group, Bloomerang, Boardable and DonorSearch.
Interview Highlights
The interview highlights appear in the text below. To get the entire scoop from Marc, you’re gonna have to watch the video!
The 4 Primary Leadership Styles
AE: Marc has recently completed a research project on leadership styles and a culture of philanthropy, and I’m going to let Marc tell us about the research and what he found.
MP: Two years ago, we did a research project to look at leadership systems in nonprofits, so this one revisited that, and Adrian Sargeant wanted to look at leadership styles as well.
- Servant leadership
- Transformational leadership
- Charismatic leadership
- Transactional leadership
These were the four leadership styles in academic literature we looked at.
AE: For anyone who doesn’t know who Adrian Sargeant is, he’s probably the leading academic researcher in the field of philanthropy. So when you said you did the research with him, it adds a lot of weight.
MP: Thank you for that. I know he’s world class in helping nonprofits, especially taking the big research and making it applicable to smaller nonprofits.
Which Leadership Style is Best for Fundraising?
AE: Okay — so you looked at leadership styles. What did you find?
MP: We looked at what are your leadership behaviors and we correlated them with is your budget growing, do you have a culture of philanthropy, etc.
We found that over half the people had behaviors that were tied to servant leadership, which makes sense in nonprofits… you serve others. So that was cool that that was the predominant model. We also found that that was the best for fundraising.
We discovered that when people exhibited servant leadership styles of nurturing the people around them, they also seemed to share the load when it comes to fundraising.
Transformational leadership, which is the “we have a common mission and a common vision, and we’re going to rally around that” was about 35%. And that had a very high correlation with the leader being able to create a culture of philanthropy, and the board taking ownership as well.
Where it fell apart is when the leader didn’t feel confident.
Discovering Your Leadership Style
AE: So how does someone know what their leadership style is? And, can they do anything about it?
MP: I’m in the process of trying to create an assessment based off the questions in here [the research survey] so that we can have some kind of tool.
You can get a copy of the research report at www.concordleadershipgroup.com/report.
AE: What are some of the most important takeaways?
MP: We have the talk of strategic planning, but we don’t have the process. I call it “strategic wishing”.
One of the things we don’t do is look at other nonprofits — can we collaborate, or can we learn from them.
Leadership and Succession Planning
MP: There’s a lot in the report that people should be thinking about for their nonprofit. People listening to this should be thinking about “who’s going to take over my position when I leave?”
AE: Succession planning.
MP: That’s what it is. If the mission is worth doing for generations to come, you need a succession plan. You’re doing due diligence.
AE: It’s not like no one’s ever dropped dead before. You may not want to think about your own mortality… even if everyone loves you and wants you to stay around forever, it doesn’t always happen. It’s just irresponsible not to plan for that type of thing.
It’s a great example of something concrete an organization can do. So what can an organization do to create a succession plan?
MP: I want to reinforce that even if it’s not the organizational succession plan, we can still be looking, “who can fill in my position?”
What is the job description? What are the requirements? That will laser-focus us to make better hires.
What are the mission critical operations that have to keep going and what could take a back burner? Where do we find that stuff (other than the CEO’s head)?
AE: Yes, and some basics like “who and how to name the interim CEO.” Having the job description and knowing where you’re going to post it, and who on the board is responsible for doing the hiring. That’s it. It doesn’t have to be long or complicated.
Final Thoughts from Marc Pitman
AE: Okay, final thoughts?
MP: My best advice [to those looking to improve their leadership skill] is to look at our behaviors and be interested, at least, and curious about why we do things can help us grow phenomenally as leaders.
Adrian Sargent was mentioned above as a leading academic researcher in the field of philanthropy. If you’d like to download my own research report with Dr. Adrian Sargeant on major gifts:
10 Steps Your Nonprofit Can Use to Raise Major Gifts (Even If Your Board Member Won’t Help)
What questions do you have about your leadership style? Do you have some idea of what it is based on this interview? Let me know in the comments.
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