design: Wiley
For my wife, Patti, who always supports and believes in me.
1 Introduction and Purpose of This Book
I remember my first formal leadership assignment with great clarity. I had been working as a case manager serving delinquent youth placed in foster care. My executive director had called me quite out of the blue to ask if I might assist with a situation that had arisen within one of the organization's community residences for young people who were transitioning from the state psychiatric hospital back into the community. Apparently, the staff within the residence had “run off” the former program director. It was an uprising of the finest order, a vote of no confidence in his leadership such that the entire staff team was threatening to walk.
When I arrived on the site it was clear that I was not welcome. I still recall the steely greeting and the lack of willingness to engage with me, even at the most basic level. Somehow, I represented the administration and there was no way in hell that the team was going to allow me any opportunity to fill a leadership role. Over the next few months I had what could only be called a baptism by fire. As if in the pitch dark I worked carefully to feel my way through the challenges of becoming accepted as a leader by a disenchanted team. More than once I stumbled and found myself tripping over or even into one difficult situation after another. There were certainly lessons learned and each lesson came with its share of bumps and bruises. There were also breakthrough moments that were a combination of happenstance and strategy gone well.
In this instance, I was thrown into a leadership role with only my wits and whatever sensibility I possessed about the human condition and what it would take for people to once again trust someone in a leadership role. Since that time, now more than 40 years later, I have come across many opportunities to develop my leadership and management capacity. Some of these opportunities mirrored my first formal leadership assignment, necessitating that I knock around in the dark with an ever‐emergent understanding of what needed to be done, a live‐and‐learn method. Other learning opportunities were more formal in nature, through training or education; some were supported by the colleagues and mentors I encountered within the field along the way; and still others came from the work itself. The people we serve, the team, and the experiences you have within the nonprofit field combine to teach you while you strive to make a difference in the world.
After four decades it's remarkable to consider what I have learned through this experience about nonprofit leadership and nonprofit management. There are many lessons learned, some of which demonstrate the simplest strategies to implement effective leadership and some that are by nature more complex, requiring more of one's attention as well as practice to master. And then there are the lessons that fall into the category that is simultaneously simple and complex, where the resulting leadership practice is straightforward yet filled with many layers of dynamism, purpose, and potential.
I must admit that leadership strategies that maintain a simultaneous stance of being simple and complex are among the most intriguing and, incidentally, when mastered, the most potent when it comes to advancing your nonprofit leadership capabilities. In accord with Jeffrey Kluger's (2008) work I have come to think about the presence of simultaneous simplicity and complexity within organizational leadership as simplexity. The idea of simplexity used this way can be considered the presence of simple strategies that have within them multiple layers as well as significant implication for leadership practice. This conceptual frame is similar in some ways to Koestler's classic idea of a holon, where something is simultaneously a part of something else while being whole in and of itself (1967). Of note in the conceptual frame of a holon is the importance of the interconnectivity between the two. Like a holon, strategies within simplexity can stand alone and at the same time are interdependent.
An illustrative way to think about the presence and use of simplexity and its potential for impact is to consider how country or blues music is structured. Country music is largely built using three chords with a chorus, blues music with three chords in a repetitive progression. Simple, right? Well, yes and no; if you consider each genre, it will not take you long to realize the depth and scope of the music that has resulted from these simple patterns. Furthermore, if you have ever picked up a guitar and tried to become the next Garth Brooks or B.B. King, you will quickly realize just how tough it is to take the basic chord patterns found in each genre and become the next music legend. Mastering strategies that engage simplexity takes time as well as specific tried‐and‐true strategies. Do not worry: this book will help you with this as well as other strategies to advance your leadership practice.
This book is an effort to capture the lessons learned from decades of effective nonprofit leadership practice. The goal is to help you avoid, if you wish, some of the knocking around in the dark that comes from being unsure about how to move forward with a leadership situation. And while no amount of teaching or sharing of strategies and techniques can make it possible to avoid instances of “baptism by fire,” this book will assist you in developing a leadership toolbox that will help you advance as a nonprofit leader and manager.
The notion of a leadership toolbox is an important one. Leadership performed well requires that you develop a set of capabilities that can be drawn upon to help advance your goals and objectives. Each of these capabilities have their own nuances and require that you become skilled at implementing them. As we discuss in Chapter 2, being successful in leadership requires practice, similar to the way using a tool requires that you know its purpose and that you have worked enough with it to understand what it offers as well as its limitations, not to mention the level of skill that you bring to its use.
Many of us can recall a former leader or manager (you may have one at this very moment!) who knew how to use only one or two tools of what should have been a complete toolbox for leadership practice. The leader who has only a hammer is ill equipped for the complexity we find in today's organizations—not all problems are nails in need of a hammer. At the risk of over‐using the metaphor, try hiring someone to build your house and see how it goes if they know only how to hammer things. It is not a pretty sight, and the desired goal will be destined to fail. It's comical when you think about a carpenter who can manage only the swing of a hammer, pounding away in an endless effort to cut a board or tighten a screw, only to fail in the end. We laugh at the image, but the truth is that many managers and leaders find themselves with only one or two tools that they have become relatively proficient with. Let's not stick to the same few tools and instead commit ourselves to building a proper set of tools to help advance your capabilities to effectively lead.
The goal of this book is to help you develop your leadership and managerial capabilities. The toolbox seen here contains tried‐and‐true tools. Like the toolbox metaphor, the idea behind this book is to share tried‐and‐true strategies that will assist you throughout your leadership practice within the nonprofit industry. By using tried‐and‐true strategies, you will be prepared to refine and develop your leadership toolbox.
Now it is true that some might criticize the use of tried‐and‐true tools as turning a blind eye to what is new and emerging. The intent here is not to exclude new and emergent strategies—in fact we will explore some of what is new and upcoming—but rather to impart what has been learned as successful strategies for advancing leadership over the course of four decades of successful nonprofit leadership.
This book also endeavors to help you heighten your capacity for what I call scholar/practice‐based leadership. The book draws upon what is written about leadership practice in today's complex organizations and importantly delves into practice‐based strategies and techniques.
