How to Make Non-profit Leadership Development Work?

Learn how non-profit leadership development programs play an important role in organizational success, with one of the USA’s biggest animal welfare non-profit organizations showing the way of AI adoption.

Non-profit organizations are one of the most vital pillars of the American society. But here’s a sobering fact: they are also some of the most high churn workplaces, with some research suggesting annual rates as high as 24%. Non-profit organizations are often mission-oriented, but people within them frequently have unmet professional aspirations.

For instance, research by NonprofitHR shows:

• The top two reasons for voluntary turnover were better opportunities (reported by 57% of the people) and lack of opportunities for career growth (reported by 43% of the people.)
• About 48% of the respondents faced challenges with retaining people working in entry-level roles.

The result is evident. The non-profit organizations are losing their share of young workforce as they are unable to offer a roadmap toward growth. Amid the resource scarcity that characterizes non-profits, as well as the highly demanding nature of the work, the workers are left with few choices but to move on.

One critical factor in this gap is the lack of support that people managers offer in such workplaces. Since non-profits are characterized by resource scarcity, there are bigger claims on the time, money, and efforts before professional development programs can scoop up.

In such a scenario, the people managers have a great role to play. A number of roles in non-profit sectors call for frontline work, putting the managers in a position to directly influence, coach and guide their team members. Given the varied nature of non-profit missions, a lot of this happens outside conventional workplaces with desktops and coffees.

At times, it’s not in the hands of managers either. Most managers in non-profit organizations are not trained in vital people management skills like coaching and motivating others, and thus set up for failure (which itself happens due to time and resource scarcity). Since the model of leadership is incomplete in itself, there are further hurdles in the development process.

The Nature of Non-profits Poses Unique Challenges for Leadership Development

Let’s understand this better with an example.

The Best Friends Animal Society is one of the USA’s foremost warriors for pets in shelters. As a sanctuary for homeless animals, it brings together a passionate group of volunteers working on-field for rescue, support, and care. With a workforce of 900+, more than half of whom work remotely while the rest are distributed in care and training operations, Best Friends has a dynamic work environment frequented by emotionally charged moments. This blog post will take up their case to learn more about non-profit leadership development programs.

Since the workforce is distributed and partly remote, centralized development programs for people managers are a huge task. The complexity increases for teams across multiple states or countries, with different departmental objectives, personal goals, and learning needs being the first layers demanding personalization. 

Moreover, as many people are working on the ground, there is limited time available to participate in leadership development programs that could last days or take online courses frequently offered as replacements.

A lot of non-profit organizations have similar stories, leading to a few common leadership development challenges:

Establishing consistent leadership and management development programs

This becomes a big challenge because uncertainties are the rule, not the exceptions. There are frequent changes and reallocations that the leadership of non-profits is always grappling with, leaving little bandwidth to invest in the professional development of their people. Moreover, as Janis explained, several people are working in the field. It leads them to have uncertain work hours, availability of time, and mental capacity to learn effectively.

The matters are further complex due to the involvement of volunteers. Since not everyone is a full-time employee with specified work hours, learning budgets, and defined trajectories, organizing development programs is much more complicated.

Enabling learning on the go for busy professionals

Suppose you are managing a team of volunteers. You know that you need to have a leadership development program in place for them. But your options are;

• A great leadership coach with solid credentials and an hourly charge of $600 who is available for your team every alternate Wednesday.
• A recommended leadership development workshop led by people you look up to, which involves three-day residential learning at the charge of $5000 per person.
• An online course on a reputed platform that your team may or may not consume passively to tick boxes and get a certificate.

These options are not just hypothetical. Most offerings for non-profit leadership development training are unrealistic and do not align with the job requirements. To take any of these courses, people need to shell out significant fees, take a good deal of time off work, and need a level of mental freedom that our industry does not offer. This creates a big quandary for L&D and HR teams of non-profits who are searching for effective ways to develop people leaders.

Getting leadership development training that matches the context of non-profits

Workplaces in the non-profit sector differ from corporate ones in a major way – a lot more emotional investment is asked for at every level. As a mission-driven team, you are deeply tied to the outcomes you build toward. For the leadership roles, this poses a unique challenge where they need to focus on professional growth for their own sake and balance it with a high amount of passion and empathy toward the cause. That’s why burnout and emotional distress are quite common in non-profit organizations, which call for a higher focus on non-profit leadership development training focused solely on building emotional resilience, healthy ways to be empathetic, and building work-life balance.

Measuring the impact of leadership development for non-profits

Every workplace has a hard time tracking the impact of leadership development programs. The story is the same for non-profit organizations. It is further complicated by two factors:

• First, the HR teams must manage multiple stakeholders. Investing in leadership development training for non-profit managers would be feasible only with their approval. Thus, measuring impact is vital in making a solid case and securing the necessities.
• Second, there is a usual delay in adopting innovative solutions based on advanced tech. It keeps non-profits under the grasp of older management philosophies and training methods.

As a result, non-profit leadership development programs need to be very clear about tracking the right metrics, setting benchmarks, and effectively showcasing impact.

All of these challenges of developing leaders in non-profits tietie into the broader HR issues, such as planning career progression paths, creating succession pipelines, and better retaining people. Investing in non-profit leadership development impacts all of these since it shows the people that you care.

What are the Leadership Development Goals for Non-profit Organizations?

Similarly, Best Friends Animal Society’s critical area is developing people leaders and managers. They have developed programs to support these professionals at different points in their career journeys, from onboarding to remedial training if needed. 

To sum up, their objectives take this shape: 

• Ensure that the people leaders are supported at all times in their jobs since the nature of work does not align with fixed hours or locations. 
• Provide access to personalized training, particularly for skills like emotional competence and communication critical to professional success.
• Engage the latest tech in leadership development to meet the needs and expectations of the workforce, in order to retain them at the organization.

With these ideas in mind, the team moved ahead with integrating Risely into their existing and planned manager development programs. 

How to Create an AI-powered Leadership Development Strategy for Non-profits?

While the team had multiple leadership development programs on their agenda, they added Risely to the mix to increase support coverage and reach more people, which was a critical gap in the strategy. 

You can hear it out from Janis, who leads Leadership and Staff Development at Best Friends Animal Society:

Fundamentally, we can see three pillars of Risely contributing to the success of leadership development programs at non-profit organizations like Best Friends Animal Society:

Nudges and activities for daily learning

Microlearning is a lifesaver for busy professionals, which is very common in the non-profit sector as we discussed earlier. It becomes even better when it matches their contextual needs and helps them beat people management challenges by investing as little as 15 minutes a day.  Nudges on Risely are personalized at multiple levels:

• Your skill development needs: First, it focuses on the skills you need to work on. As a result, the leaders of organizations like non-profits that call for high human skills but offer little time to learn them effectively can leverage this mode of learning and development. 
• Your team members: You might struggle in delegating tasks to one team member and confronting another. Risely takes care of that too by ensuring that microlearning resources are shared with your specific team members in mind.
• Your strengths and areas of improvement: What does having a low score on communication skills really mean? It could be need of improvement in listening, or a lack of clarity, or something else entirely. Risely’s action-oriented nudges meet you at your level of skill growth.
• Your job function: It would not make sense to teach a sales manager something only an engineering manager deals with, so why do we do this in people skills. Risely’s nudges are personalized to your job role. Thus, the situations, tips, and advice you receive matches your unique context.

On-demand coaching with the AI Merlin

One-on-one coaching is among the best tools to support developing leaders. But as Janis explained, most employees do not have the time needed to invest in learning that way. Plus, it creates a big organizational overhead. An AI coach like Risely’s Merlin solves for this by ensuring coaching access 24/7, even when the team member is on the road. 

For non-profit organizations, people pose a unique challenge. There’s the need to value their time while also supporting their growth. Increasing the access to coaching through AI-powered services like Merlin helps Best Friends meet the growing needs of their people leaders.

For example, suppose a manager is on the way to address a conflict with a network partner. They can practice this conversation with Merlin since it can take up people’s roles as you define them and become your role-play training partner. That’s just one scenario: there are plenty of difficult conversations that people managers need to have and situations that put them in doubt where a coach’s nudge will help.

Since coaching is already on-demand and hyper-personalized, it saves the L&D function some effort of hiring coaches, matching them contextually, and constantly monitoring the flow. Moreover, you are deploying the latest technology for L&D, thus showcasing how much you value your employees. 

In-depth skill assessments for every learner

Assessments and growth go hand-in-hand, as one leads to the roadmap of the other. Yet, conventional skill gap analysis leaves much to be desired. By deploying Risely’s leadership skill assessments for people managers, Best Friends Animal Society is changing things up massively. 

Risely’s leadership skill assessments are a great tool for measuring the health of 30+ critical leadership development skills. They also offer analysis at the sub-skill level, thus going deeper into both diagnosis and problem-solving. Company-wide benchmarking helps managers stay motivated and look forward to reaching and creating new standards across the organization.

All three key actions tie into each other. The ease of assessing numerous managers on leadership skills frees up L&D bandwidth big time. It further goes into creating personalized learning journeys for them, which pave the way for coaching with Merlin and daily growth through nudges and activities—thus setting up a positive growth cycle. 

Looking Forward

As an animal welfare organization, Best Friends Animal Society highlights the values of transparency, accountability, and trust in everything they do. Risely’s AI coach, Merlin, helps reinforce them in conversations with the team members by becoming a company culture agent. You can program the AI coach to reflect upon company policies and values and even include them as suggestions. So, even if your manager is lost on the way, someone is holding them back and showing them the way toward achieving what matters the most to you.

In the coming year, Best Friends Animal Society is exploring ways to add Risely to more of its leadership and staff development programs. The AI-copilot for leadership development has enabled Best Friends to reach out to more people who need support, enhance employee experiences, and ultimately do more of what they love doing—caring for animals. 

Non-profit leadership development programs are super important in your success story. The only challenge is that so far they have been designed without your interests at the core. At Risely, we are trying to flip the script.

Sign up today and share your thoughts on what resources would benefit you the most. Connect with our sales team at [email protected] to explore sustainable pricing options tailored for non-profit leadership development.