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.

Tags: nonprofit

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Consulting for Nonprofits, Leadership, Nonprofit Sector, Trends, Youth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.