Pangea Governance & Leadership

Part V

Leading the Nonprofit Organization

Leading the Nonprofit Organization

Theories of Nonprofit and Organizational Leadership

34

Theories of Nonprofit and Organizational Leadership

J. Patrick Murphy

DePaul University

There is no one best way to lead. If there were, surely someone would have stumbled on it by now, and we would all know the best way and do it. But leaders have to lead people, and each one is different, and each one changes constantly. There is the rub.

What are the most successful formal organizations in the world using the single criterion of longevity? The Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches, the parliaments of Britain and the Isle of Man, and medieval universities are among the oldest, continuously operating formal organizations in the world. Nonprofits and governments have survived the test of time. How do they do it?

Theories are ways of seeing our world and how it works. Having a theory is good. Having a good theory is better. Most people believe leadership makes a difference. We know leadership effects are often attributed to leaders without merit; some authors suggest that leadership is overrated in modern complex organizations—that they are little more than organized anarchies. Most researchers, however, point to the ample examples of famous leaders of nonprofit organizations—Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Theresa, and Vincent de Paul come to mind easily. But these are the famous leaders; other everyday leaders are equally effective but less famous. None of the famous leaders was likely to have used a leadership theory, but leadership principles are evident in each of them. Each had a dream or a mission and an urge to serve. Gandhi wanted to win freedom from British rule for his people by nonviolent means. Martin Luther King Jr. wanted equal rights for all. Mother Theresa and Vincent de Paul wanted to relieve the anguish of poverty for the poorest of the poor in their times. They were dreamers, visionaries, and riveted on their missions.

A Google search of leadership nets 153 million hits. An Amazon.com search of books on leadership nets 329,928 hits. (Google has 61,800,000 hits for books on leadership.) There is no lack of opinion or theory on leadership.

Why is leadership so popular? Leaders get things done; they are inherently interesting people. What is leadership? Having a definition of leadership is useful for leaders. Most definitions are useful, but any definition that works for the leader is a good one. Here are a few definitions to consider:

Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.

Peter G. Northouse, 2007

In essence leadership appears to be the art of getting others to want to do something you are convinced should be done.

Vance Packard, 1962 The Pyramid Climbers

Leadership is the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations.

Jim Kouzes & Barry Posner, 1995

The great leader is seen as servant first, and that simple fact is the key to greatness.

Robert K. Greenleaf, 1977

Kouzes and Posner summarize most modern theorists when they state that leadership is a relationship; it is everyone’s business; and leadership development is self-development. Northouse (2007) does a marvelous job of codifying classic theories of leadership; they are worthy of scrutiny. Particularly suited to nonprofit management are several theories or principles of leadership offered here.

In one sense, we can make the case that leading people is much the same whether the organization is for-profit, nonprofit, or governmental. In another sense, these three sectors are nothing alike. The nonprofit sector relies on volunteers for much of its workforce and is dependent on charitable or government sources for its revenue. Another distinguishing feature is that employees, as well as volunteers, usually have strong personal commitments to the mission of the nonprofit, more so, perhaps, than the other two sectors.

In The Leadership Challenge, Kouzes and Posner (2007) offer five leadership practices—they’re discussed later—based on years of research with thousands of leaders. Their work is most appealing for the nonprofit sector because it is based on values and is readily applicable to nonprofits. For example, the authors (in other volumes) applied their work specifically to two nonprofit arenas, higher education institutions and Christian organizations.

In Servant Leadership, Greenleaf (1977) provides a popular approach to leadership adopted and adapted by many organizations—including for-profits—but especially nonprofits and Christianity-based organizations.

Sally Helgesen (1995), in The Web of Inclusion, offers a pattern and process of leadership based on the web as model. Her approach is especially poignant inasmuch as she studied women leaders (The Female Advantage Women’s Ways of Leadership, 1990). For many years now, fully 70% of those working in nonprofit organizations are women. Many authors suggest women lead differently; Helgesen provides a theory for modern organizations, whether led by women or men.

These three sources—Kouzes and Posner, Greenleaf, and Helgesen—do not focus exclusively on nonprofit organizations or offer a theory of nonprofit leadership. They do, however, have common features and great insight into leadership practices that seem especially appropriate to nonprofits.

First, a word about the glue that holds nonprofits together, mission. Nonprofit organizations are rooted in mission. No modern organization can survive today without a keen sense of mission. This is especially true for nonprofits. Marginalized institutions will be squeezed out of existence or will find their niche depending on whether they find their distinctive mission and stick to it. It has to do with marketing, introspection, and hard work. Too many institutions have drifted into flailing and failing situations where they attempt to be all things to all people but end up offering second-rate programs because they have lost their way. Often, these institutions languish because of organizational drift from the original mission.

Mission is always long range, yet it requires action everyday. Action is where the fun is for administrators. Leaders are people of action; others ponder. A good mission attracts good people. This is foundational for nonprofits; good leaders take advantage of it—exploiting people’s self-interest and personal values in the best ways. Whether volunteers or employees, people want to match their personal values with the distinctive values of the institution while working in a learning and teaching organization. A good mission allows people to see how they can make a difference in the world. Mission attracts good people, not only clients, but donors, stakeholders, and neighbors, too. It attracts funding, private and public, and focuses on a defined human need. It makes marketing meaningful and possible, providing meaning and opportunity to make a difference.

Mission serves a market—it is customer or client oriented—rather than product oriented. It looks outside itself for opportunity. This is essential for success but difficult to do well in nonprofit organizations because of creeping bureaucracy. Worse, the typical nonprofit organization has a flat structure, is complex and decentralized, has vague, ambiguous goals and fluid participation, and often looks and acts like an anarchy.

Excellent institutions fashion visions, missions, and marketing plans based on becoming distinctive. Perhaps, a few examples would illustrate. Long ago, when Stanford University was a sleepy little liberal arts college, a visionary president called on his faculty to develop “steeples of excellence” to make Stanford distinctive. In Florida, in the early 1980s, the new president of Barry College reviewed the mission (she called it her “midnight shakes” because the mission is what she would automatically think of if shaken awake at midnight and asked what Barry was all about). Within 5 years, she had doubled enrollment and faculty salaries, changed it from a college to a university, and expanded the campus considerably—based on a revitalized and widely shared mission.

A few examples of mission statements may help.

From the Girl Scouts of America:	Girl Scouting builds girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.
From the Friends of the Parks, Chicago:	Our mission is to preserve, protect, improve and promote the use of Chicago parks, forest preserves and recreational areas for the benefit of all neighborhoods and citizens.
From the United Way of Chicago:	Mission: To improve lives by mobilizing the caring power of communities.

Clearly worded statements that use evocative language to capture the imagination of readers make good missions. The best mission statements detail exactly what the organizations do, who benefits, and what makes them distinctive. Shorter is better. Compelling language is easier to remember. Can you fit it on the back of a T-shirt?

Even stodgy organizations like the Internal Revenue Service can have clear, forthright missions:

Mission: the purpose of the IRS is to collect the proper amount of tax revenues at the least cost to the public, and in a manner that warrants the highest degree of public confidence in our integrity, efficiency and fairness.

Institutions with large endowments, if led well, can build in quality as their distinctive edge. Those without quality or distinction will be trampled. Size counts; age counts. Smaller, younger institutions must work harder at defining their missions and earning their distinctiveness. The challenge for leaders here is always mission. Leaders must balance resources based on mission and goals in respect to diversification—balance caution with rashness, opportunity with risk. Leaders keep their eye on the task, not on themselves.

Nonprofits differ from for-profit companies like Proctor and Gamble. For instance, colleges like to create habits, vision, commitment, knowledge, and loyalties—attempting to become part of the recipient, not merely a supplier. The marketing problem then becomes one of selling an intangible, a concept. This is seriously different from selling a better shampoo.

The first rule of marketing is: You cannot do everything. Do not put scarce resources where you are not going to have results. The second rule is: Know your customers. A customer is anybody who can say no. Leaders take them seriously. The leader should be the chief marketing officer, exercising the role of gathering and disseminating information. For example, one college president would hang around the student cafeteria and ask students what they thought of the place (with tongue firmly in cheek, he told them he was a janitor). A few years ago at Brown University, the new president asked community members how they could become noteworthy when they had to compete directly with Harvard and Yale universities. Ten years later, Brown became distinctive for two things: focusing on professional women and getting close to the students—a plan put into place by listening to the students and by fashioning a mission in response to what they need. Focusing on mission and market made it so; it is the sine qua non for leaders in nonprofits.

The Five Practices of Leadership

Most leadership authors today agree with Kouzes and Posner when they say that anyone can be a leader and that we can lead from any place in an organization—except from behind a desk or computer. Leadership is interactive; we need to get in front of people and engage them. But anyone can do it—not only presidents and upper management. We find leadership at the lowest levels in organizations, informal but powerfully effective people doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Good organizations ask: What are our basic principles? What do we believe in? How can we design management principles and strategies that reflect our values? What can we do for our customers—better than our competitors? Kouzes and Posner (2007) began their research asking what people expected of leaders—more than 75,000 people around the world. They found that

what is most striking and most evident is that only four [characteristics] over time . . . have always received over 60 percent of the votes. And these same four have consistently been ranked at the top across different countries.

What people most look for in a leader (a person they would be willing to follow) has been constant over time. And our research documents this pattern across countries, cultures, ethnicities, organizational functions and hierarchies, gender, educational, and age groups. For people to follow someone willingly, the majority of constituents believe the leaders must be

· Honest

· Forward-looking

· Inspiring

· Competent (p. 29)

Other characteristics included: intelligent, fair minded, broad minded, supportive, straightforward, dependable, and many more. Students chose the same four characteristics for their best teachers. Credibility is the foundation of leadership. Who would follow anyone who was not honest? Why follow someone who is not forward-looking? Who could follow someone who was not inspiring or competent? These are the foundational characteristics of good leaders.

The first law of leadership, then, is if you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message. All the clichés apply: Leaders practice what they preach, they walk the talk, their actions are consistent with their words, they put their money where their mouth is. But the fact is, leaders do what they say they will do.

Five Practices

Kouzes and Posner offer five practices of excellent leaders.

1. Model the way. Leadership begins with something that grabs hold of you and will not let go. Excellent leaders lead through their own words, lives, and actions. We cannot lead through someone else’s life or words. Kouzes and Posner (2004) ask, what grabs you? Excellent leaders find their voice by clarifying their personal values. They set the example by aligning their actions with the shared values of the organizational members. “People sense that the great question in life is not between life and death. We are all going to die. The question is: What are you living for? Or what are you dying for? It is the same question” (p. 85).

2. Inspiring a shared vision. Kouzes and Posner found that excellent leaders envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities. Then, they enlist others in a common vision by appealing to the shared aspirations of organizational members.

3. Challenge the process. Excellent leaders search for opportunities by seeking innovative ways to change, grow, and improve. They are not afraid to experiment and take risks by constantly generating small wins and learning from their mistakes.

4. Enable others to act. Kouzes and Posner’s leaders foster collaboration by promoting cooperative goals and building trust. They are able to strengthen others by sharing power and discretion with them.

5. Encourage the heart. Excellent leaders recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence. They celebrate organizational values and victories by creating a spirit of community among organizational members.

These practices are the core beliefs of Kouzes and Posner, based on 25 years of research. Kouzes and Posner found that people who use these behaviors are seen as being more effective in meeting job-related demands; being more successful in representing their units to upper management; creating higher performing teams; fostering loyalty and commitment; increasing motivational levels and willingness to work hard; reducing absenteeism, turnover, and dropout rates; and possessing high degrees of personal credibility.

One more thing: leaders are teachers. Leaders are about the business of teaching and learning. “There’s solid evidence that the best leaders are highly attuned to what’s going on inside themselves as they are leading and to what’s going on with others. They’re very self-aware and they’re very socially aware” (Kouzes & Posner, 2006, p. 29). We learned long ago that the best teachers are those who are passionate about what they teach. Leaders are passionate about what they lead. The best leaders are teachers, too.

Most of us start out as teachers and then move into administration. As teachers, we learned that the best way to learn our subject matter was to teach it. The best way to learn about leadership is to teach it—in the classroom, on the job, in groups, and one-on-one. Nothing helps the learning process like experience and teaching. We in the business of higher education leadership do not need to look far for the greatest lessons on leadership. We need only teach them.

Kouzes and Posner (2006, p. 20) remind us that the best leaders are great teachers. Leaders teach the mission. Leaders should be the best of teachers and should teach the mission relentlessly. We teach by modeling the way, by telling stories, and by focusing on mission.

The Leader as Servant

In a 1974 talk to the School Sisters of St. Francis at Alverno College, Greenleaf (1977) defined institution in these words:

An institution is a gathering of persons who have accepted a common purpose, and a common discipline to guide the pursuit of that purpose, to the end that each involved person reaches higher fulfillment as a person, through serving and being served by the common venture, than would be achieved alone or in a less committed relationship. (p. 237)

Greenleaf believed nothing of substance will happen in society unless people inside institutions are able to (and want to) lead them into better performance for the public good. The idea of the servant as leader came to Greenleaf from his reading of Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East. Leo, the main character, is the stable boy who takes care of a group on a journey. Only after losing their way and finding Leo as the leader of a monastic order does the narrator understand that Leo was leader—as servant boy—without whom they lost their way when they meet again years later. For Greenleaf, the story clearly says that the great leader is seen as servant first, and that simple fact is the key to greatness. For Leo, leadership was a by-product of service. Leadership could be taken or given away, but service and the servant nature was the real person—not bestowed, not assumed.

Servant leadership is a mission of care and service of others. It appeals to organizational members and volunteers in nonprofits. It is a theory popular with faith-based organizations because it helps people develop their own personal spirituality and provides a framework for virtue. Gandhi wrote, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others” (quoted in Kumarasamy, 2006, p. 101). Mother Theresa and her followers lost themselves among the poor in Calcutta; St. Vincent de Paul and his followers lost themselves among the poor in Paris—all in service of others.

Greenleaf (1977) takes this approach: The natural servant, the person who is servant first, is more likely to persevere and refine a particular hypothesis on what serves another’s highest-priority needs than is the person who is leader first and who later serves out of promptings of conscience or in conformity with normative expectations.

My hope for the future rests in part on my belief that among the legions of deprived and unsophisticated people are many true servants who will lead, and that most of them can learn to discriminate among those who presume to serve them and identify the true servants whom they will follow. (p. 15)

Greenleaf realized that followers are incomplete creations, and the only way to accomplish anything through them is to serve them. If we are servants—either leader or follower—we are always searching, listening, expecting that a better solution is in the making. Greenleaf had a notion of continuous quality improvement. He suggested we take a fresh, critical look at issues of power and authority—from the point of view of service to others in pursuit of mission.

Greenleaf (1977) offered a new moral principle.

The only authority deserving one’s allegiance is that which is “freely and knowingly granted by the led to the leader in response to, and in proportion to, the clearly evident servant stature of the leader. Those who choose to follow this principle will not casually accept the authority of existing institutions, rather, they will freely respond only to individuals who are chosen as leaders because they are proven and trusted as servants.” (p. 10)

Power and authority develop organically in servant-leader organizations—freely given by the followers to the one among them who rises up by serving them. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in the early days of personal computing provide one kind of example of leaders who were at the same time inspiring, compelling, and creative. But they also focused on leading their people by serving—providing Friday afternoon beer and pizza bashes, installing workout rooms for employees, and truly believing in the ingenuity and commitment of their teams. It is said that Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs would invite the team designing the Macintosh computer to his home in Los Gatos where they would work, eat, sleep, and let off steam, sometimes for days at a time.

Who is the servant-leader? For Greenleaf, it begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Only then does the conscious choice to serve bring one to aspire to lead. This is much different from the usual—one who is leader first, to satisfy a power drive or to acquire objects. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them is the continuum of the infinite variety of human nature. The difference manifests itself in the care by the servant-first to make sure to serve other people’s highest-priority needs. Care is the hallmark of nonprofits.

Greenleaf provides three foundational questions to check the servant-leader:

Do those served grow as people?

Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?

What is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, not be further deprived?

Maslow (1971) asserted, in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, that self-actualizing people such as Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Albert Einstein were all committed to a greater purpose in life. If people are becoming healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous—and more likely to become servants—are they not becoming more self-actualized?

Note in Greenleaf’s third question his concern over the least privileged in society. Does this not connect directly to most nonprofit missions of concern, care, and service for others? What are we trying to do here? For Greenleaf, this is the hardest question to answer. What is our mission, vision, or goal? Leaders dream the dream and show the way. Organizations may arrive at a goal by group consensus or by inspiration of the leader. But the leader knows it and casts it in a creative way. Every achievement starts with a goal—a yearning for something that is currently out of reach. Leaders state it in compelling ways to challenge people. For Greenleaf, leaders must first earn the trust of their followers. Followers accept the risk along with the leader. Similar to Kouzes and Posner, Greenleaf says leaders earn trust only when we have confidence in their values, competence, and judgment and when they have a sustaining spirit.

Greenleaf notes that the very essence of leadership, going out ahead to show the way, comes from inspiration. Too many who presume to lead do not see clearly. Rather, too many leaders preserve the system in place—which Greenleaf calls a fatal error. The leader, he says, needs more than inspiration. The leader initiates, provides the ideas and the structure, and takes the risk of failure along with the chance of success. It is not enough to have a vision; the leader is constantly dreaming bigger dreams, pursuing a fresher vision, casting and recasting the mission to adjust to the environment as needed. For Greenleaf, nothing much happens without a dream. For something great to happen, there has to be a great dream. Behind every achievement is a dreamer of great dreams. Much more than a dreamer is required to bring it to reality; but the dream must be there first.

Greenleaf reminds us that the art of leadership is to bridge the information gap with intuition. Leaders must be more creative than most. Creativity is largely discovery—a push into the uncharted and the unknown. Occasionally, leaders need to think like poets, prophets, lovers, or dreamers. Intuition is a feel for patterns, the ability to generalize based on what has happened previously. Leaders act on hunches, but calculated ones.

Greenleaf (1977) believed foresight “is a better-than-average guess about what is going to happen when in the future beginning with a state of mind about now” (p. 24). The prudent leader constantly thinks of now as the moving concept in which past, present moment, and future are one organic unity. This requires living by a rhythm that encourages a high level of intuitive insight about the gamut of events from the past to the future.

It begins with listening. Greenleaf believed that only a true natural servant automatically responds to any problem by listening first. This helps others see the leader as servant first. The lesson here is that servant-leaders start by honing listening skills: To be a servant-leader, be a listener-leader. This works because true listening builds strength in others. Do we respect others so much as to give them our complete attention so they feel they are the most important person in the world to us? There may be another lesson: To identify servant-leaders, seek those who listen well.

Lincoln relied on storytelling successfully. too. Lincoln reminded people of their common goal (the preservation of the Union) and kept this mission foremost in everyone’s mind by his constant, clear, concise vision, which he preached everywhere to persuade—because he had no power to command. He was able to lead by being led. He was the consummate listener—he persuaded others by listening well and creating a culture of consent. He developed trust of the common people by his great honesty, his power of persuasion, and his indefatigable pursuit of mission.

Greenleaf (1977) reminds us of another axiom about listening: “One must not be afraid of a little silence. Some find silence awkward or oppressive, but a relaxed approach to dialogue will include the welcoming of some silence” (p. 17). Greenleaf tells us that “leaders need two intellectual abilities not usually assessed in an academic way: they need a sense for the unknowable and they need to foresee the unforeseeable” (p. 21). Leaders get ahead of others because they know things and foresee things others do not. For Greenleaf, the failure of leaders to foresee may be an ethical failure. A serious ethical compromise today, he would say, is sometimes the result of a failure to make the effort at an earlier date to foresee today’s events and take the right actions when there was freedom to act. How do leaders learn this business of foresight? They live at two levels of consciousness. One is the real world—concerned, responsible, effective, value oriented. At the same time, they live detached, riding above the real world, seeing today’s events, and seeing themselves deeply involved in the events.

Where do we find these people? For Greenleaf (1977) the servant-leader always accepts the person, while sometimes refusing to accept some work or performance, as good enough. Great leaders have empathy and an unqualified acceptance of their people. Acceptance of the person requires a tolerance of imperfection. Gandhi used the simple, uneducated poor of India to bring the British Empire to its knees. Vincent de Paul recruited poor country girls to become Daughters of Charity to serve the sick and homeless of Paris. Anybody could lead perfect people—if there were any. There is none. Parents who try to raise perfect children raise neurotics.

For Greenleaf, the typical person—immature, stumbling, inept, lazy—is capable of great dedication and heroism if wisely led. Many are disqualified to lead because they are unable to work with and through the half-people they have. But they are all we have. The secret is in attracting a team of ordinary people to perform better than they would otherwise be able to do.

Power is the means of getting things done in organizations. Leaders create power by sharing it—not by hoarding it. Servant-leaders share power by working in service of others helping them to discover and build their own power—together. Followers need to discover and develop power as they become more seasoned as organizational members and especially as they begin to assume more leadership. They learn about power from leaders primarily. It is easy enough to see the effects of power in organizations—things get done, goals accomplished—it is harder to learn to regulate the use of power appropriately.

Servant-leaders are powerful people, but their power is more like a gentle wind than a ball-peen hammer. Warren Bennis, the author and spokesperson on leadership and former president of the University of Cincinnati, was asked at one of his conferences why he did not use any examples of college presidents in his writing and research. He thought about it for a minute and replied, “I don’t think of college presidents as leaders in the traditional sense; they are more like prime ministers.” Prime ministers lead by persuasion, by working in service of others who often work in opposition to each other. The prime minister has to keep one eye on the common goal, the other on those whose cooperation is necessary to reach it. That is servant leadership.

Years ago, Lisa Nigro, a former Chicago cop, founded the Inspiration Café—a small eatery for homeless people on the north side of the city. It is a place where the homeless are welcome to dine—to order off a menu, sit at a table, and be waited on as people are in restaurants anywhere. If they do not like the food, they are welcome to send it back. It is a warm café where patrons are treated like valued customers—not a soup kitchen, not a church basement, no serving lines. The homeless receive an excellent meal at no cost served by volunteer chefs, caring and respectful—“a restaurant for the homeless without the bill.” The café also offers culinary training and job placement services to its guests.

The Inspiration Café is a place for homeless people where the dignity of the individual person comes first. Those receiving such service are then more able to offer similar service to others, too, perhaps as chefs in training. Volunteers, management, paid staff, cooks, and patrons all benefit from serving and being served. Inspired by the notion of servant leadership, the Inspiration Café offers respect and dignity to the least privileged through inspired service in such a way that they become servant-leaders themselves—a fitting example of servant leadership enacted and mission accomplished. Nigro says she wanted to create an atmosphere where “you would be missed if you didn’t come.”

There is good news here for leaders of nonprofit organizations: They do not have to find the best people for their causes, they just need to get the best out of the ordinary people they recruit. This is why connecting those individual, personal values of people to the mission and the organizational values of the nonprofit is the first step in effective leadership.

The Web of Inclusion

Sally Helgesen (1995) describes the web of inclusion as “a pattern, a model for coherently ordering people and their tasks; and as a process, a way of thinking and acting, of behaving and solving problems as they arise” (p. 19). As a web, the pattern is analogous to the spider’s web with concentric circle structures linking people and processes to one another and bringing everyone close to the center (the leader). The women leaders she studied “labored continually to bring everyone at every point closer to the center—to tighten ties, provide increased exposure and encourage greater participation” (p. 20). For Helgesen, the women organizations heads saw themselves at the center of things rather than the top—where they built consensus rather than issued orders and created collegial atmospheres where colleagues focused on “what needs to be done rather than who has the authority to do it” (p. 20).

The process feature of the web of inclusion focuses on inclusion via open communication. Continuous sharing of information reduces fear and enables colleagues to be more self-managing than traditional hierarchical structures and authoritarian lines of communication. Helgesen (1990) points out that the process feature of inclusive communication includes a teaching feature flowing outward from the center of the web: “The process of gathering and routing information, of guiding relationships and coaxing forth connections, strikes an educational note” (p. 56).

The web is based on feminine principles described by one of Helgesen’s informants, Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop,

principles of caring, making intuitive decisions, not getting hung up on hierarchy or all those dreadfully boring business school management ideas; having a sense of work as being part of your life, not separate from it; putting your labor where your love is; being responsible to the world in how you use your profits; recognizing the bottom line should stay at the bottom” (quoted in Helgesen, 1990, p. 5).

Helgesen (1990) quotes another of her subjects, Barbara Grogan: “I don’t draft five-year plans—I just do the best job I can, and trust that it will lead me to where I’m supposed to be next” (p. 59). It is that sense of destiny—where she will be next—that highlights another feature of the web. The web includes a sense of intuition, opportunism, and patience for what is coming next—an audacious combination of leadership characteristics.

Women described their intellectual and ethical development as developing voice—and they preferred the notion of having a voice to having a vision. Vision implies seeing; voice implies hearing; for Helgesen (1990), the differences are significant. For instance, teachers use their voices to raise up students and to raise concern for causes, to persuade, listen, and learn. For the women Helgesen studied, the focus is always on finding their voice rather than having their vision—implying a dynamism and give-and-take with their colleagues in the web. “Leading with a voice is only possible when one has reached a certain level of development as a person; otherwise the voice will not ring true” (p. 230).

The flip side of having a voice is listening with care. Helgesen (1990) notes,

The women in the diary studies all are skilled listeners; it was a strong aspect of their management style. They used listening both as a tool to gather information that had bearing on managerial decisions, and as a way of making the people in their organizations feel that their ideas and beliefs were of value. (p. 242)

One of the subjects, Frances Hesselbein, considered listening the heart of her leadership—the prototypical female skill (p. 243). The web of concern expands quickly to global proportions. Women leaders ask about “what role the company can play, . . . what role can I play, particularly as a woman. . . . Where can I make my best contribution? The question really gets down to why was I born?” ( p. 49). In distinction to traditional, male models of leadership, the women in Helgesen’s (1990) study were a gestalt—a whole: “By contrast, the women in the diary studies do not separate their personal selves from their workplace selves; they do not split being a mother off from being a manager, being an executive from being a friend” (p. 67).

The web of inclusion has already had effects on how we think of leadership—more collaborative, more listening, more negotiating, more humane. Gandhi, too, is a model of inclusivity: “Highly self-aware individuals such as Gandhi show an increasing sense of care, concern and compassion beyond the borders of their family and friends” (quoted in Kumarasamy, 2006, p. 109). Mahatma Gandhi said,

Consciously, or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make not only for our own happiness, but that of the whole world at large. (p. 97)

Albert Schweitzer said, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve” (quoted in Kumarasamy, 2006, p. 97).

Summary

The three theories—or authors—considered here have several things in common that serve nonprofit organizational leaders well. In no particular order, here is what we learned.

Leaders know themselves and understand what they have to offer—and they are able to meld their personal values with the mission and values of the organization. They are unwilling to put aside the qualities of being a mom, even as a CEO. They wanted to serve before they led. They are credible.

For each of the authors, leaders are outward focused and intent on others. They serve them, care for them, include them, build trust in them, and respect them. They are concerned for the underprivileged. They try to see the best in others—and to get the best out of them.

They are all listeners. To be visionaries and dreamers they find out they need to listen to others before they can engage them in their work.

They are dreamers and visionaries who connect through webs, service, common values, and shared aspirations. They are teachers.

There is a sense of the metaphysical and beyond-the-here-and-now aspect to each author’s perspective on leadership. As they see it, leaders ask, “Why was I born?” and “What am I living for?” and “What grabs me?” They live to serve others and make a difference with their lives. There is a sense of spirituality or a spiritual dimension to them. They connect to causes and values that transcend the mundane.

Most of all, perhaps, the authors discussed in this chapter understood there is no one best way to lead.

Barry Posner has a baseball cap on a shelf in his office with MBFA stitched across it. He says it means Management by Fooling Around. Personally, Barry is a funny guy who takes great pleasure in all he does—even a job as stodgy as dean of the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. But the lesson is sound. Great leaders constantly fool around with ideas great and small. They have fun, too.

References and Further Readings

Greenleaf, R. K. (1977). Servant leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. New York: Paulist Press.

Helgesen, S. (1990). The female advantage: Women’s ways of leadership. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell.

Helgesen, S. (1995). The web of inclusion. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (Eds.). (2004). Christian reflections on the leadership challenge. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2006). A leader’s legacy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2007). The leadership challenge (4th ed.).. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kumarasamy, A. (2006). Gandhi on personal leadership. Mumbai: Jaico.

Maslow, A. H. (1971). The farther reaches of human nature. New York: Viking.

Northouse, P. G. (2007). Leadership theory and practice (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Phillips, D. T., II (1992). Lincoln on leadership: Executive strategies for tough times. New York: Time Warner.