This Lesson on Nonprofit Leadership Brought to You By MLK

How can you fix a rudderless organization without bringing in a real leader? In the nonprofit world, you can't.

It hasn’t gotten much front page treatment, but the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—Martin Luther King’s civil rights group—appears to be close to the end. There have been years of mismanagement, a lack of direction, some hanky-panky with funds, and a board rift that sent two board factions to court trying to decide which was the real one. After a judge ruled last year who was in charge, the plan was for Bernice King, MLK’s daughter, to become president. Well, now there’s a rift between the newly empowered board and King. Apparently she doesn’t want to be a figurehead, and the board wants to be in charge. I don’t necessarily think King was the SCLC’s savior. (MLK’s children have a pretty sketchy leadership history.) But I do know that in the nonprofit world, you never see a turnaround without a strong leader at the center. And interference from meddlesome boards is one of the main ways leadership is thwarted.

Why does leadership matter so much in the nonprofit world? In the for-profit world, making money is all that matters. There are many cases of mediocre business leaders turning around a company and managing to make money. (The history of U.S. car companies is full of these kinds of CEOs.) The typical nonprofit exists to address a social problem or serve a population (one place it can fail); it has to engage allies in addressing its core issues (a second place it can fail); it also has to please funders and monetary supporters (another place it can fail); and it has to keep mission-oriented employees engaged (yet one more place it can fail). That's a lot of things for a good leader to address, and virtually impossible to do successfully with weakness at the
center.