Nonprofit Leadership as a Vocation

Nonprofit leaders must shoulder a heavy burden of responsibility in our tumultuous age. How can they avoid the pitfalls along their path? (2,075 words / 8 minute read)

Max Weber, 1918. Photo by Ernst Gottmann via Wikimedia Commons

I recently joined my AEI colleagues for a spirited seminar on Max Weber’s classic 1919 lecture, “Politics as a Vocation.” Weber gave it to his Munich University students less than three months after Germany’s catastrophic defeat in World War I. His students found themselves roiled between the revolutionary and reactionary currents swirling through their country. They sought guidance from their professor on how to respond.

In his lecture, Weber warned his audience about the inherent baseness of politics and the excruciating demands it imposed on would-be leaders. Even so, he sought to steel at least a few of them to lead their country in a better direction amid the new age of mass democracy. For this to happen, they first had to determine whether they had a calling for politics – not simply as a profession, but as a vocation in the moral sense.

Weber’s guidance, meant to instruct would-be politicians in another time and place, remains no less salient here and now — and not just for those holding or seeking elected office. Nonprofit leaders increasingly face the burdens and dilemmas Weber warned about. They too must grapple with, and hold in creative tension, divergent ways of leading in an uncertain and compromised world.

The ethic of responsibility vs. the ethic of conviction

What Weber termed the ethic of responsibility presumes that human beings, and thus any efforts they collectively pursue, are inevitably hampered by shortcomings and moral ambiguities. Leaders and their partisans bear responsibility for the consequences of their actions, regardless of whether they expected or intended them. Their hands will inevitably get dirty. The real question is whether the changes they seek are worth the costs and compromises involved.

In contrast, the ethic of conviction is grounded in the integrity of one’s values and principles. As Weber notes of this set of ethics, “if evil consequences flow from an action done out of pure conviction, this type of person holds the world, not the doer, responsible, or the stupidity of others, or the will of God who made them thus.” The desire to seek justice, not its aggregate and cumulative effects, is all that matters.

At times, the austere Weber seems to come down on the side of the ethic of responsibility. Ultimately, however, he calls for a synthesis. Responsibility without conviction about the ends of politics degenerates into stasis and cynicism. Conviction without responsibility enables excessive zeal or folly. As Weber observes,

“The ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility are not absolute opposites. They are complementary to one another, and only in combination do they produce the true human who is capable of having a ‘vocation for politics’” (his emphasis).

Then, in his famous concluding paragraph, Weber likens the work of politics — and the same could be said of nonprofit leadership today — to the task of “slow, strong drilling through hard boards, with a combination of passion and a sense of judgement.” The passion, borne of well-honed convictions, supplies the resolve to drill and keep drilling. The judgment, informed by an abiding sense of responsibility, helps a leader determine where, when, how, and with whom to drill.

Like adept politicians, the best nonprofit leaders live both “off” and “for” their work; theirs is not merely a profession but also a vocation. In pursuing their calling, nonprofit leaders must articulate convictions that can attract and inspire funders, staff, partners, beneficiaries, board members, and the public at large. But these same leaders must also serve as responsible stewards of their institutions, brokers of discordant coalitions, strategists prepared to retreat in order to fight another day, and sufferers of unfair criticism. The competing sets of imperatives perpetually threaten to pull these leaders and their organizations apart.

The unbridled ethic of conviction

The past decade has seen the tension between the two ethics grow lopsided for nonprofit leaders, skewing their moral compasses toward the ethic of conviction.

Several factors have driven this drift. In a polarized age — when the other side is cast not just as wrong but as a threat to all that is decent and just — compromise with opponents or criticism of allies become impossible. As President Trump came to dominate the political landscape, he pushed friend-versus-enemy politics to new extremes. The populist wave he summoned and exploited, newly echoed now on the left, has deliberately sought to tear down institutions and the elites who lead them. Rising generations of Americans, for their part, have developed an understandable distrust of institutions and leaders that, in their experience, have repeatedly failed them and / or become corrupted. And the firestorm of the woke/anti-woke clash only added more combustible and diametrically opposed convictions to this volatile mix.

All to say, many nonprofit leaders and their organizations have gotten pulled towards the ethic of conviction and away from the ethic of responsibility. Consider a recent New York Times story entitled “The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself Apart.” It maps out the many ways in which the venerable environmental nonprofit became a painful case study of this pattern. It is an all too familiar story in progressive circles, as Ryan Grim and Maurice Mitchell have noted previously.

But consider also the recent conflagration at the Heritage Foundation. The leader of this proud nonprofit brought it low by catering to the most zealous Gen Z ideologues on his side of the political spectrum. Then he sought to justify his actions as proof of his principled convictions and rock-ribbed conservatism. He too has sailed his organization straight onto the rocks. Failures of nonprofit leadership due to a runaway ethic of conviction and a bankrupt ethic of responsibility are a bipartisan phenomena.

What will it take for leaders seeking to do better by their organizations and causes to rein in this self-destructive imbalance?

From “Good to Great” Amid “The Nonprofit Crisis”

Two reflections by wise students of nonprofit leadership can help guide executive directors seeking to strike a better balance. The first is a pamphlet published 20 years ago by business management theorist Jim Collins entitled, Good to Great in the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking Is Not the Answer. It riffs on the framework and key insights of Collins’ business bestseller Good to Great, adapting them for nonprofits.

A central insight in Collins’ thinking about the social sector – and the answer to his subtitle – is that nonprofit leaders have a different and in many respects more complex challenge than business leaders. This is in large part because social sector leaders face a greater need to exercise what Collins terms “legislative” rather than “executive” modes of leadership. As Collins defines them:

“In executive leadership, the individual leader has enough concentrated power to simply make the right decisions. In legislative leadership, on the other hand, no individual leader – not even the nominal chief executive – has enough structural power to make the most important decisions by himself or herself. Legislative leadership relies more upon persuasion, political currency, and shared interests to create the conditions for the right decisions to happen. And it is precisely this legislative dynamic that makes Level 5 leadership particularly important in the social sectors.”

Level 5 leaders, in Collins’ framework, are the most highly evolved type. “They are ambitious first and foremost for the cause, the movement, the mission, the work – not themselves” (his emphasis). He goes on to note that the legislative aspects of this form of leadership are not about,

“Being ‘soft’ or ‘nice’ or purely ‘inclusive’ or ‘consensus-building.’ The whole point of Level 5 is to make sure the right decisions happen – no matter how difficult or painful – for the long-term greatness of the institution and the achievement of its mission, independent of consensus or popularity” (his emphasis).

The second book, published just this month, is Greg Berman’s The Nonprofit Crisis: Leadership Through the Culture Wars. The author knows of what he writes about, having served for almost two decades as the Executive Director of the Center for Court Innovation (now the Center for Justice Innovation), a criminal justice reform nonprofit based in New York City. A long-planned succession found Berman stepping down from his post just as the COVID lockdown began in 2020. In the years since, he has sought to make sense of the mounting crisis that he refers to in his title.

Berman provides the most holistic and practical treatment of the overarching task of nonprofit leadership since Collins’ 2005 reflection. His book is a timely and worthy successor, not least because it traces how the nonprofit world has subsequently fallen into disarray,

“As a new generation has entered the workforce, as polarization has gripped the country, and as demands for racial justice have proliferated. These forces (and others) have buffeted the nonprofit sector. Many of our nonprofit organizations are the weaker for it – less cohesive, less stable, and ultimately, less effective.”

In our troubled era, Berman contends, nonprofit leaders must learn how to to navigate a narrow path, one that avoids,

“Both knee-jerk capitulation to the demands of their most radical staffers and the kind of symbolic battles that can drain organizational energy and effectiveness. This patient, tactical approach to managing institutional tensions might seem cowardly and insufficient to anti-woke advocates and left-wing activists, both of whom seek the catharsis of confrontation.”

But however inadequate this middle path may seem, it does reflect the imperatives of Weber’s ethic of responsibility and Collins’ Level 5 leadership. It also sets the stage for Berman’s ideal mode of leadership.

The Quest for “Good Stewardship”

Berman notes that when he first took up his leadership post at the Center, several people encouraged him to “put his stamp” on the organization and place it in service of his ambitions as its leader. That guidance felt out of whack with his instincts. As he codifies these intuitions in The Nonprofit Crisis,

“Nonprofit leaders should sublimate their personal goals and ideas to the needs of their organizations. For lack of a better term, I would call this approach ‘good stewardship.’

At the risk of being lofty (or blasphemous), running an organization is a sacred trust. Executive directors are asked to guide and protect a valuable commodity – the health and reputation of their agency. It is a responsibility, and a burden, that each executive carries for a limited time and then passes on to the next person. Nonprofit organizations belong to no one, not even long-serving founders.

In an era defined by the culture wars, good stewardship requires four qualities in particular: emotional intelligence, flexibility, humility, and long-term thinking.”

The essential nature of these qualities in the current moment would be readily apparent to Weber and Collins. In addition to exploring what these qualities entail, Berman shows rather than tells how leaders can embody them with a series of candid vignettes drawn from his own experience as an executive director. He also considers how these characteristics can help resolve several thorny issues facing today’s nonprofit leaders. They include how to, among other things,

• Engage more team members in decision-making (while still being able to make good and timely decisions);

• Mentor across the often profound diversity in contemporary nonprofit staffs;

• Stay on task and on mission in the face of myriad potential distractions; and

• Determine when and how to hand-off the baton to one’s successor.

Running throughout Berman’s book is a nagging concern: that the nonprofit sector, having squandered the good will it enjoyed in the eyes of the American people by embroiling itself in the culture wars, will not be able to regain their good graces. He readily acknowledges that “restoring public faith in civil society and the nonprofit sector is not going to happen overnight” – especially when President Trump and his allies routinely denigrate nonprofits and their work.

But for those leaders determined to do their part in restoring public trust, Berman concludes with a clear call to action – and good stewardship:

“The best way for nonprofits to begin to address the corrosive problem of declining public trust, in sum, is to do an outstanding job of whatever their core work may be – serving the needy, educating young people, building housing, etcetera. The real, long-term enemy is not Trump – it’s public cynicism.”

Ultimately, good stewards combine the ethics of responsibility and conviction. The more who become capable of and inclined to do this, thereby revealing themselves as having a vocation for nonprofit leadership, the better off democracy in America will be.