Should You Consider Interim Leadership for Your Nonprofit?
Nonprofit leadership is both highly challenging and highly rewarding, as nonprofit leaders are tasked with making difficult organizational choices and determining the best tasks and projects to move their mission forward. Because success or failure can be more difficult to track than profits and losses, being a nonprofit leader also means inspiring your team members and volunteers to buy into your vision and plans. Good leaders can combine these skills effectively, binding their team together while holding a high standard of work that meets the organization’s aspirations.
The central role leadership plays at a nonprofit means that any turnover in leadership, whether it be for a career change, an executive leaving for a new role, retirement, or even termination, can have huge effects on organizational morale and capabilities. This is a growing issue in the nonprofit world, as a projected wave of retirements promises to create a leadership deficit. If you’re losing a leading member of your organization whom you plan to replace, the urge may be to hire someone right away to avoid any major hits to morale. However, some organizations choose to hire an interim leader for that position, as this can offer some unique benefits without a long-term commitment. Here are some of the key reasons to consider this approach, as well as some reasons it may not work for your organization:
Key benefits of hiring interim leadership
Morale boost
Leadership changes can be difficult for organizations to weather. They feed into perceptions of chaos, instability, and change that can make team members and volunteers question their future at the organization. Difficulty finding a permanent replacement for a leadership position can also reinforce this, as it leads people to conclude the organization is under-resourced, dysfunctional, or unattractive to candidates for some reason.
Hiring or appointing an interim person to hold that position can help allay these concerns, providing a short-term solution while you work on a longer-term plan. It can also help turn some of these perceptions on their head — change does not always have to be bad, and the interim leadership can help your team become more comfortable with present and future changes.
Organizational stability
A long, drawn-out search for someone to fill a leadership role can mean that other leaders or team members have to spend that time fulfilling the obligations of that role. This added workload, while a necessary stop-gap measure, can contribute to burnout and cause productivity to suffer. While members of mission-driven organizations are typically not lacking in motivation at work, relying on them too much can cause major internal issues.
An interim leader can prevent this, taking care of the day-to-day while allowing the leadership search team to find someone interested in the role on a long-term basis. This stability extends to the HR team or whoever is searching for a permanent replacement. Because executive and leadership searches have high stakes, they can often take much longer than a standard hiring process. Having an interim person in place allows you to search, interview, and vet candidates at a pace that gives you the best chance of finding the ideal candidate, rather than rushing through the process.
An outsider’s perspective
An interim leader who comes from outside of the organization not only brings a breadth of experience from their other work but also has the advantage of operating from outside of the status quo at the organization. While their ability and willingness to push for organizational changes might be limited, they may also be able to employ their outsider perspective to identify glaring issues or opportunities their predecessor or long-term team members missed. Additionally, because they are temporary hires, they will likely feel less restrained and more willing to be honest and direct about issues they see. Good leaders will be able to make use of this honesty to help the organization see a better way of doing things.
Risks of using interim leadership
Confusion and poor communication
Using interim leadership is not a standard approach to filling a leadership role, and communicating about the goals, thought process, and benefits is key to helping get your team to buy in. However, depending on the nature of the departure, the speed of hiring, and the effort or lack of effort put into communicating with your team, interim leadership can feed negative perceptions and rumors among staff.
Offering open, transparent, and ongoing communication about your decisions, goals, and the progress of your search for a permanent candidate can help address negative perceptions. You should also encourage leadership to maintain an open-door policy for team members to discuss concerns and worries about what these changes mean, as this can help you learn exactly what the sources of stress are and how to address them.
Lack of accountability
When you choose to hire an interim manager or executive, you should include as part of this process a defined and actionable set of goals along with a timeline to achieve them. Many organizations of all types can fall into the trap of using an interim hire to procrastinate on a search, or of viewing the loss of leadership as a settled issue.
Instead, you should be very clear about your goals and the timeframe you expect to complete them. If you’re hiring an interim leader to gauge their ability to lead, set a cadence of check-ins and benchmarks you want to see them meet. If they are only there while you search for a permanent replacement, set a timeline for the search. Not only do these goals keep you focused, but they also allow you to easily communicate status updates to the executive team or the whole organization.
Changing leadership is tough. We know. We’ve been there.
In our collective decades of experience, our team has assisted with leadership changes, reorganizations, and other major changes. If you’re bracing for change or you simply want to be prepared, we can help you to identify key opportunities and strategies you can use to move confidently forward. If you’d like to learn more about what we do, reach out to us.
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The information contained in this article is not a substitute for legal advice or counsel and has been pulled from multiple sources.
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