Every nonprofit leader, in order to succeed, must possess four essential skills.

These are not, despite what might first pop into your mind, personal solicitation, foundation grant-writing, annual appeal writing, and, when all else fails, begging.

Fundraising skills, and others such as financial management, collaboration, human resources management, and working with a board, are of course important. But they are secondary to the big four. Here they are, in my humble opinion:

People skills: Everything a nonprofit leader does involves working with people. Staff, volunteers, board members, funders, clients, advisors, and vendors all have in common the fact that they view their relationship with the organization through the lens of their relationship with you. Respect, compassion, competence, collaboration, and similar values will help you to succeed. Being difficult, sullen, uninterested, sarcastic, or uninspiring will only hurt your ability to get the job done. People skills are, in large part, about your integrity and authenticity.

Vision: A nonprofit leader must be able to see with crystal clarity where s/he wants and needs to take the organization, and then be able to set in place the structures, find the resources, and build the team to get there. Without execution, a vision is just a daydream.

Communication: It is critical to be able to explain where you are going, or why you have made a difficult or unpopular decision. So, too, is the ability to listen to others, take in what they are saying, and respond to it. This is different from “people skills.” It is the specific ability to exchange information and emotion with others, to be believable and authentic while doing so, and to be able to persuade others to join you.

Reality Testing: Nothing is more fatal to a nonprofit than a leader who cannot or will not see what Jim Collins calls “the brutal facts.” Without knowing where all the problems are, and absent a clear grasp of your current situation, you cannot lead.

We read every day about an impending shortage of employees, and especially of leaders, in the sector as the baby-boomers retire.

Personally, I think the crisis, if there is one, is a bit further off than the demographers tell us. This is because most projections have the boomers retiring, as their parents did, at age 65. That’s just not going to happen.

As a card-carrying boomer myself, with two teenagers yet to put through college, aging parents to care for, and, of course, a super-sized California mortgage to be paid, not to mention a minuscule retirement account, thanks to spending most of my career working at small nonprofits, I certainly cannot imagine retiring at 65, which is still more than a decade away.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to retire at 65, but I have more modest (and realistic) goals — like taking an occasional weekend off.

I imagine most nonprofit leaders of my generation are in a similar fix. So, rather than wholesale retirements, we are more likely to see the kind of scenario Marc Freedman of Civic Ventures write about in his book, Prime Time. Boomers will keep working, perhaps full-time, perhaps part-time, and most likely in a somewhat different role, but they will keep working. This phenomenon is driven in part by a lack of retirement funds and in part by good health (from a lifetime of eating sprouts, no doubt), which will allow us to be productive longer than any previous generation imagined.

To the extent that boomers stay in their nonprofit leadership jobs beyond age 65, this will have a profound impact on younger leaders. No one wants to wait until s/he is 50 for a chance to lead! Perhaps we can create mentoring roles for older executive directors, whereby they can still be involved in the leadership of the sector, while making room at the top for younger leaders.