Knowledge project: Building Effective Nonprofit Executive Teams
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Nonprofit leaders: How are you going to elevate your executive team’s performance this year? We invite you to take the new Executive Team Diagnostic from The Bridgespan Group(hyper-linked text)to help you identify the most important areas where you can strengthen your executive team.
The Executive Team Diagnostic(hyper-linked text)will take about 10 minutes to complete. You will be able to receive your results in a week or two showing how your responses compare to a benchmark of other nonprofit leaders.
Your responses to the diagnostic will also help us identify how Bridgespan can be most valuable in supporting nonprofit executive teams. Informed by aggregate results from the diagnostic, we will be creating tools, templates and guidance that you and your team can use to address your highest-priority needs.
Ultimately, we hope that this effort to strengthen executive teams will significantly advance the effectiveness of the entire nonprofit sector. And in the meantime, we encourage you to take this opportunity to reflect back and look ahead to a productive 2018 for your executive team.
Potential blog article to announce project
Building best-in-class executive teams in the nonprofit sector
Some in the nonprofit sector believe that a lone “charismatic CEO” is enough to reach full potential. Our experience suggests otherwise: in working with hundreds of nonprofits across diverse domains, we have seen how executive teams can make or break an organization.Running a nonprofit organization is a team sport. An all-star CEO can no more succeed than a single all-star basketball player can win a game with his four teammates watching from the sidelines.
In spite of this reality, our sector has a knowledge gap around executive teams. Much work has focused on developing and supporting individual senior leadership. There is not, however, agreement on what makes nonprofit executive teams effective, or on thesteps executive teams can take to improve.
Thinkers in the for-profit sector provide some initial ideas about what makes an effective nonprofit executive team. Three key attributes emerged from our scan of the literature:
- Clarity on the executive team’s roles, responsibilities and composition
- Good working dynamic within the executive team
- Capable CEO/ED leadership of the executive team
Based on our initial research, we have created an Executive Team Diagnostic(hyper-linked text). You can take this 10-minute diagnostic today to pinpoint where you and your executive team can focus your improvement.
Your input will also help us advance toward deeper insights around nonprofit executive teams. Some of the questions we’re tackling include: what are common pain points for nonprofit executive teams? How should a nonprofit executive team think about its key responsibilities? Who exactly should sit on the executive team, and when is a broader “leadership team” needed as a complement? How should values like equity and passion for mission inform the way executive teams run meetings, resolve conflict, make decisions, communicate internally, and hold themselves accountable? And most importantly, how can executive teams change and improve in each of these areas?
We’ll keep you updated on progress as we learn more about each one of these questions. Ultimately, we aim to build a comprehensive understanding of what makes executive teams effective in the nonprofit sector, and to develop tools, templates and guidance to help nonprofit executive teams reach the next level of performance.
We ask for your partnership in this effort. By taking the Executive Team Diagnostic(hyper-linked text) today, you can start to build an agenda for strengthening your executive team this year, and we’ll better understand how we can support executive teams like yours. We hope to hear from as diverse a range of nonprofit leaders as possible. The more voices from the sector we can bring into the work, the better our ability to equip leaders like you with the resources you need to achieve your full potential.
You can also reach out to any time if you want to share stories or questions about executive teams. We’d love to know how you’re strengthening your executive team, what challenges you’ve encountered, and what successes you’ve had so far.
We look forward to making 2018 a year of learning and improvement for your executive team and others across the sector!
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