Recently I was asked to judge for the 5th Annual Young Nonprofit Leaders Awards given by Young Nonprofit Professionals Network. This is quite an honor, as I told the organizers, not least because it has indeed been a long time since I could qualify for membership in this group. I do not know what the exact age cut-off is, but I am pretty sure that I am way past it.

This request made me start thinking about the evolution of leadership development in the field. When I was a 26 year old nonprofit leader I was pretty much expected to learn on my own, kind of a sink or swim approach. This was largely true of my generation: we had no specific management training (I had a BA and MA in comparative literature), and sometimes we had no actual experience in the field. We spent a lot of time on the phone asking other, slightly less clueless colleagues questions, and we grew organizations through a lot of trial and error.

This approach fit with my generation’s “do your own thing” approach to life but I am not so sure it benefited our organizations. Back then we figured things out but trial and error is costly when you are on the thin margins of a small nonprofit.

These days more nonprofit leaders have specific training, often a masters in business or public or nonprofit administration, and once in the job they increasingly participate in programs that further develop their leadership and management abilities.

It is more than a bit ironic that having never participated in or benefited from any leadership development effort when I was new to the field, I now spend a great deal of time leading these programs. I’m glad the sector and I have evolved and I look forward to where the next generation will lead us.

In 2006, a Yahoo executive wrote a memo that I think many nonprofits would do well to heed. It became known as the Peanut Butter Manifesto. I just came across it in an article in the New Yorker.

We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything – to everyone. I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

Sound familiar? In good times there are resources enough to try new ideas, experiment, spread the nonprofit peanut butter far and wide in an effort to “do everything for everyone.” That could be the mission statement for a few nonprofits I know. But during tough times, you must focus, you must decide what is most important, what is your unique contribution, where you have the best chance to accomplish your mission. This may mean cutting back in some areas to strengthen others. It may mean job reassignments or even layoffs. But your strategy, now more than ever, must be clear and focused.

Pile the peanut butter thick on a smaller slice of bread.