Essential Leadership Skills for Non-profit Executives

The following four programs are versions of the Essential Leadership Skills series that deal with key performance issues that have been adapted for the special challenges of the non-profit sector by using specially selected exercises, case discussions and simulations.

1. Improving Decision Making in Non-profit Organisations

Nonprofits have special responsibilities and often exist under special constraints that may make measuring and improving performance more difficult. This program is based upon the “good news” that non-profit organizations can use the same systematic five-step process for maximizing performance that has worked so well for organizations in the private sector.

This program shows how to use this five-step process systematically to pinpoint the tasks that are most critical for organizational success, and to motivate people toward achieving maximum long-term performance on these core tasks. The approach is applicable at a variety of levels, including individual performers, teams, units, and the organization as a whole. Through case studies and simulations, the program will address the adaptations that may be helpful in getting the best results from the use of this process in the non-profit sphere.

2. Persuasion, Cooperation and Help: Strategies for Today’s Nonprofits

Studies in evolutionary psychology and related fields suggest that people have as many natural predispositions to cooperate and help others as they do to favour themselves, and yet very few people understand how to optimally engage the more altruistic, collaborative facets of human nature for the good of the community and society. Based on the same structure as our general persuasion seminar, this program looks at the special problems – and advantages – that leaders of non-profits have in formulating and implementing effective persuasion strategies. Special attention is paid to identifying the conditions under which people tend to cooperate and contribute to larger causes.

This program employs exercises, cases and simulations on the identification and use of the appropriate persuasion principles in areas specific to non-profit functioning and development, and provides ample opportunities for participants to learn to analyse the four key considerations in crafting persuasive communications. Participants are urged to bring their own challenges into the discussion and create a plan for dealing with them with tutorial assistance during the program.

3. Maximising Performance in Non-profit Organisations

Research shows that to maximize and maintain maximum performance over the long haul, five requisites must be met in a step-by-step fashion. This program shows how to use this five-step process systematically to pinpoint the tasks that are most critical to organizational success, and to set up systems that motivate people to successively approach maximum performance on these core tasks. The program shows how this approach can be applied at a variety of levels, including individual performers, teams, units, and the organization as a whole.

4. Changing the World: Innovation in Charities and Associations

This program teaches participants to identify and remove impediments to human creativity and systematically develop an organization that can innovate as well as maximize; an organization that can improve viable core businesses, but knows when to abandon obsolete practices in favour of new, more productive options. Six basic challenges that all innovators face will be examined, and insights provided for meeting them successfully.

The program is geared to identify the innovation challenges faced by nonprofits as well as the special sources of creativity that they can call upon. Case studies and exercises are selected to make this program maximally relevant for non-profit executives and organizations.

Custom Programs for Non-profit

Non-profit Strategy

The two programs listed below are specialized organizational strategy seminars built upon the framework used in “Strategy: Orchestrating the Five Leadership Processes in Planning and Action” and adapted to one of two general types of nonprofits – charities and associations – by selecting cases, exercises and simulations that are specific to one of these two.  In each of these programs we will be dealing with strategy in terms of what the organization needs to do to create asystemic set of planned actions and contingency measures designed to achieve its ultimate goals and how it uses thefour essential leadership processes (deciding, persuading, maximizing and innovating) to achieve strategic success. The versions of this seminar are:

1. Organisational Strategy for Charitable Organisations

2. Organisational Strategy for Non-profit Associations

Making the Environment Meaningful

Decision Making, Persuasion and Change

Organizations that strive to protect the environment, whether in the non-profit or the public sector, face serious challenges in bringing the import of ecological changes home to constituencies. The features that they seek to preserve – ecosystems, endangered species, environmental tolerances and carrying capacities, etc. – may seem unfamiliar, distant and tangential to many. Moreover, the consequences are often delayed, cumulative, uncertain, probabilistic, complex, and impersonal. In many cases they are unintended outcomes of well-intentioned or at least non-malicious acts. There are many factual and accurate but non-compelling ways to portray ecological problems to the public and to key decision makers, and there are many other approaches that might be compelling but are also inaccurate or unwise.

This special “persuasion and influence” program focuses on how to identify and build persuasive strategies around ways to frame environmental issues that are both factual and compelling. Though case discussions, exercises and simulations, participants will explore decision analysis methods that help frame the key issues and applications of persuasion principles and strategies to bring these principles to bear to change behaviour, social practice and policy.

Tactics and Strategy for Grassroots Organisations

Small face-to-face groups and communities that cooperated to achieve common purposes have been a requisite for solving human and social problems throughout history and pre-history. There is considerable evidence that many of the elements that most clearly define “human nature” are manifested in small group. Nevertheless, modern “macro-societies” tend to promote small social units (individuals, couples, and nuclear families) that can be easily moved about and incorporated to meet the needs of large organizations -- and fluid, brief, “modular” task-specific interactions. People simultaneously need grassroots organizations and find that participation in them can be difficult to maintain even if the solutions that they offer are important to them.

This program teaches participants to make the most of this venerable institution. It begins with a review of research on social motivation and proceeds to consider a number of real-world models used by organizations in recruiting, organizing and operating on the grassroots level. We explore the need to choose a model that fits the issues, goals and objectives of the individual and the groups. Finally, the program examines relationships between strategy, leadership and ethics in grassroots organizations.

Other Non-Profit Focussed Custom Programs

AIDS and HIV: An Integral Approach

At-risk Children and Adolescents

Droughts and Desertification: Humanitarian Responses

Leadership in the Non-profit World

Endangered Ecosystems and Species

Higher Education and Scholarships

Medical Charities: Strategies for Promotion and Management

Methods for Political Change

Popular Movements and Unpopular, Undemocratic Governments

Poverty, Hunger and Homelessness

Tropical Rainforests, Biodiversity and Global Ecology