moving the needle forward on equal rights for the community I served. The bottom line matters, of course, but only to ensure that you have sufficient resources to work in the service of your mission.
In the org chart in Figure 1.2, the executive director derives power from all around her. This is why former Girl Scout E.D. Frances Hesselbein once told a reporter that she saw herself in the center and that she “was not on top of anything.”
So what did this mean for the Coors decision? The voices of the stakeholder groups around me were critical. I needed to be well informed, I needed strong input from different groups, and I needed a thought partner in my board chair to kick around the pros and cons. I knew the decision was ultimately mine but I never really thought of it that way. We were all in this together.
My development director (the one I nearly killed – see the intro) was outraged and feared we would lose more money than we earned by accepting Coors' donation. We did our due diligence and determined that would not be the case. The staff was mixed – some worried I would be eaten alive by the press (given my own corporate background) either way; others thought rejecting the money could be unfair to Coors when in fact, by corporate standards, they were leaders on gay issues.
This kind of power demands that you meet with the leaders of the Coors Boycott Committee – not to empower them but to ensure their voices are heard. We even invited them to a board meeting.
And this kind of power demands that you see the decision from all sides. We secured a meeting with the most senior people at Coors and garnered commitments from them to do more than just donate money.
And this kind of power demanded that I put myself at a national LGBT conference in which several hundred community members could share their distaste with the thought that GLAAD may make this choice. In this setting, you can be sure that I heard them. Many of them were yelling at me.
In the end, Coors became a corporate sponsor of GLAAD. Not everyone agreed but everyone had a voice. All stakeholder groups were heard and our entire process and strategy was smarter and more effective than any decision I had made on my own. This is what Jim Collins means when he talks about power in the nonprofit sector being “diffuse.” And at its best, it creates a staff that feels valued and heard, a supportive board comfortable with challenging, and a membership that sees a process rich with integrity.
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