Emerging Leadership Initiative

Attract, Support, and Keep Emerging Leaders in Your Organization

What the Board Can Do:
Linkages
Diversity
Membership
Empowerment

• Link with diverse organizations, communities, and individuals--expanding your organization's pool of potential partners, volunteers, and staff.
• Make sure your board members represent community diversity.
• Recruit and nominate emerging leaders to your board.
• When hiring a new chief executive, seek leaders from outside your circle.
• Encourage an entrepreneurial spirit and measure results.
• Focus on doing whatever it takes to empower the organization and its staff.

What the Executive Director Can Do:
Recruitment
Leadership
Training
Capacity

• Look to community-based organizations, churches, historically African American colleges and universities, tribal colleges, national service groups, non-violent hip-hop "crews" or urban street organizations for emerging leaders.
• Make sure the senior staff represents community diversity.
• Offer flexible work schedules, floating holidays, and a menu of benefits.
• Raise more money, spend it wisely, and invest in generous, fair compensation.
• Encourage senior managers to be mentors.
• Make training and professional development 5% of each personšs job--and pay for it.
• Call on emerging leaders to lead in-house staff workshops on their areas of expertise (e.g. the internet, diversity, web design, and workshop facilitation).
• Create two-year apprenticeships or fellowships with salary, benefits, and training.
• Create full-time job slots for departing interns.
• Help departing interns get jobs in other nonprofits and incubate new, spin-off programs.
• Insist on reflection, ongoing evaluation, and renewal at all levels.
• Require vacations.
• Do everything you can to inspire, convene, energize, and facilitate staff and volunteers as they work out ways to achieve the mission.

What Managers Can Do:
Hiring & Firing
Management
Career Development
Modeling & Mentoring

• When hiring, first look at internal candidates--try hard to move people up and over.
• Hire right and fire when necessary.
• Evaluate staff respectfully, objectively, and consistently.
• Expect analysis, critical thinking, and vision from emerging leaders. Ask them to project outcomes, analyze market trends, and envision the future.
• Offer real responsibility, hold staff accountable, recognize individual contributions and team accomplishments, play fair, create shared goals, set new challenges, provide support, and sometimes, let them out of your sight! 
• Make sure everyone understands how their work relates to the mission.
• Encourage every staff member to set and pursue career development goals.
• Look for ways to use technology to improve operations and programs.
• Allow emerging leaders to "shadow" you at meetings and networking functions to observe you in action.
• Help emerging leaders find peer networks. Introduce them to colleagues.
• Make a life outside work and keep reasonable hours yourself.

What Everyone Can Do:
Openness
Leadership
Expectations
Respect
Question
Learn

• Be open to unexpected leaders, fresh forms of leadership, and unusual ideas.
• Model good leadership by listening, being accountable, doing your best telling the truth, and following through.
• Acknowledge, challenge, and communicate with co-workers.
• Question assumptions and biases.
• Evaluate the work and look for opportunities to learn.
• Share information, access, resources, power, authority, and platform.