Have you noticed how many organizations promise to “teach leadership skills” to nonprofits? They’re jumping on a great trend. Nonprofits are losing their babyboomer leaders to retirement in droves – now and in the next ten years. So there’s a real, a perceived, and a future “gap” in leadership for the social sector.
How do we fill the leadership “gap?” Since there wasn’t funding, planning, or vision to do much in the way of succession-planning in this sector, there’s a scramble going on to either recruit older “for-profit” leaders to try their hand in nonprofits. Or there’s the idea that newer, younger professionals can be taught the skills they need.
That’s where the business of “teaching nonprofit leaders” comes in. There’s quite a few of them – just google it. HBS has jumped in with both feet. Peter Drucker has joined in. Others, especially in D.C., where nonprofits are prolific, are in the fray.
What I want to know is – where are the results? Who are the successful graduates? What are the “benchmarks” for these great schools and leadership programs? Show me the money!
What have these leaders gone off and done after these training sessions? What successes can be attributed to what they learned? Skills they picked up? Networking they did or learned to do?
Don’t get me wrong – as someone with more education than I ever needed I’m all for training and believe in it fervently. I even do it myself! I’d just like to have some of these “schools” and programs tracking the success of their graduates – the way other institutions do.
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