Why is the CEO role so hard?

No, seriously, I want you to think about it.

You see, this morning I wrote down 25 reasons why the nonprofit CEO role is difficult. Before I share them, let your subconscious stew on the question for a minute.

Because I request that you write and tell me what you think. Here's why:

Tomorrow, I fly to DC, where I am convening a gathering of seven CEOs who lead networks, movements, and associations of other nonprofits.

Together, they represent 1,400 member organizations directly, which in turn represent over 50,000 congregations, chapters, and community centers.

That is one gathering. 

In the last two years, my work has opened up conversations with over 310 nonprofit CEOs from across the sector. And thousands of you are listening to The Nonprofit CEO Podcast and now reading here.

I am grateful. Thank you.

I am fascinated by you, the leaders and organizations that are helping people in hard situations. I see what you are navigating, and I've been documenting patterns among CEOs in the social sector. Today, I'm beginning to share them with you in a new, systematic way.

To my clients: my advisory work continues. You have brought me on for a season, for wider perspective as you make a consequential decision. This is by definition high-stakes, so this is deep work, focused, and vital. I am committed to you, and that is not changing.

But that is necessarily a very limited footprint, just a handful of CEOs. Against the size of what the sector is carrying, it is a rounding error.

So I am doing something else alongside that advisory work: I'm organizing my research notes and data, weaving them together into a book:

Peerless: Nonprofit CEOs and the Decisions They Carry Alone.

Each week here, I will give you one element of my research and thinking. This will explore questions like: 

1. Why do nonprofit CEOs experience isolation?
2. Who do CEOs talk to before hard decisions? 
3. What are CEOs not telling their boards? 
4. What are common challenges with executive teams? 
5. How long do CEOs wait to remove a senior leader? What does that cost? 
6. What enables some CEOs to make good decisions quickly? 

I will bring you the patterns from across hundreds of these CEO conversations. What CEOs decided, what it cost them, and what they would do differently.

So I’m bringing the big picture, the view across hundreds of CEOs and organizations.

But I need you. 

Because you have the view inside, deeper and clearer from being in it every day. 

When I put a pattern in front of you, I need you to tell me where it breaks. You will know from your own week or quarter whether it passes the smell test. That correction and texture are what will make this book worth reading.

If this experiment is not for you, I understand. If you can spend those few minutes each week doing something more important to accomplish your organization’s mission, please do so. Send me a reply saying so, and we will carry on without you. 

So, to the actual Briefing for today…

On this week’s episode of the podcast, I talked with Nick Grono, CEO of Freedom Fund, a UK charity fighting modern slavery that recently received a $60M grant from MacKenzie Scott. (And that was after a $35M grant.) Nick said:

The CEO is the one person that is always looking over the horizon. I'm always looking two, three, four years out…That's the way in which the CEO's job is a 24-7 job…You're always thinking, or at least I am. And it's always just at the back of my mind.

This got me thinking about what CEOs have told me about why and how the role is hard. I was able to quickly come up with 25 this morning. Some come directly from my interviews with CEOs. Some come from my own 25 years in the sector. And some come from advising CEOs through decisions they could not discuss anywhere else.

Before you continue reading, why do you think the CEO role is so hard?

Then look below and see if I included it. If not, please send it to me.

And as you read: do you disagree with any of these? 

If so, please write and let me know. 

Here's why the nonprofit CEO role is so hard, in five categories:

What only the CEO does

1. You must be constantly vigilant. As Nick Grono has pointed out, the CEO is the only person in the organization whose real time horizon is years. And their scope is the whole enchilada. Everyone else is measured on the current quarter or fiscal year, and is rewarded for thinking and working that way. Back in Episode 17, Eric Mitchell from the Alliance to End Hunger said, “Your brain is constantly on. I'm always thinking about different levels of work and what I need to be doing.”
2. You hold the consequences of ALL decisions. A CEO absorbs the fallout of choices made by predecessors, prior boards, and staff who have already moved on. You carry it all, even if it wasn’t your call.
3. Only the 51/49 calls reach you. At least four different CEOs have said that only the close and substantive decisions land on your desk. Anything with an obvious answer gets decided further down. (President Obama originally said this.)
4. Information you cannot share with anyone. Some of what a CEO knows cannot go down to staff without alarming them, cannot go up to the board before it’s more resolved, and cannot go out to donors, ever. The material that weighs the most on CEOs often has no safe outlet anywhere inside the organization.
5. The hourglass. The CEO is the only board-facing person in the staff meeting and the only staff-facing person in the board meeting. Pressure arrives from both directions and stops there, because nobody else sits in both.

The Conditions You Are Handed

6. Sector compensation philosophy pushes people into the deep end. Nonprofits often are unwilling or unable to pay anything close to the market rate. So this means that sometimes organizations are reaching down below the actual capabilities they need. That seems to hold at every level, C-suite included. (And the CEO is not exempt from it, either.) One CEO confided, “I'm not a finance [person] by background. So understanding how to strategically leverage finances…it's all kind of a guessing game for me.”
7. Weak accountability and performance management. I’m shocked at how often performance reviews don’t happen, expectations are not put in writing, and consequences never arrive. I suspect this is related to the low compensation of #6 above.
8. Nonprofits often lack organizational discipline. Discipline here means doing what you said you would do and getting others to do what they said they would do. Many organizations lack the first. And many CEOs lack the capacity to install the second. Discipline also means acknowledging failure, not reinterpreting it as the universe teaching you something.
9. Slow to hire. Slow to fire. Stuck. Compensation, a fragile financial model, and over-indexing on fit and culture all make hiring slow. A CEO who cannot replace someone quickly will not remove someone quickly, so underperforming employees are kept in place for years. One CEO said, “Most of the decisions I made that didn't go well are the decisions I took too long to make.” And another said, “I've often waited too long to make the changes.”
10. Complex finances. Most nonprofit CEOs came up through program or fundraising, so they arrive without the financial fluency the role demands, and the role gives them no path to build it afterward. (Notice that quote in #6.)
11. New CEOs coming from outside the sector also must learn a lot. Fundraising, board dynamics, and nonprofit culture are new terrain from the business world. Boards that hire for business credentials often have a rude awakening, as does the new CEO.
12. You’re not able to invest properly to learn and grow. Boards and CEOs alike treat spending on the leader's growth as money taken from the mission. The person carrying the most weight ends up with the least support.
13. Your staff are change averse. Resistance shows up around methods, programs, and the people attached to them. Everyone can agree on the mission while defending an existing way of pursuing it as untouchable and sacrosanct. (I’m thinking about if and why people working in nonprofits are slower to change than others.)

The Load is Heavy

14. You’re trying to do two jobs. For nonprofits of $10M and up, I’m surprised how many top leaders are both President and CEO. They’re carrying external relations, fundraising, and internal operations at the same time. Some have a very strong COO and CDO who are handling the lion’s share on those two fronts. But many are just trudging along with everything. (I’m intrigued by the experiments in some organizations with Co-CEOs.)
15. Roles and responsibilities are often unclear. This includes the CEO and the top team. In many organizations nobody has written down what the job actually is, so the CEO is evaluated against an unstated standard. And everyone has different standards.
16. Time pressure. This is an obvious outcome from the previous items. You have too much to do, and no one is helping you prioritize it. This is where a Chief of Staff can be tremendously helpful in a larger nonprofit.
17. Revenue and outcomes are disconnected. In a business, doing the work better tends to show up in revenue. In a nonprofit, program excellence and money raised run on separate tracks, so the CEO operates without a clean feedback signal. (See Episode 10 with Peter Greer.)

Why You Are Isolated

18. The board is your boss, your counsel, your friend, a micromanager, and unavailable, all at once. Those roles pull against each other, and the CEO does not get to choose which one the board plays on a given day. One CEO said that the nonprofit board structure seems designed to be ineffective. In Episode 20, Dan Vogel of Flourish Fund said, “These jobs can be very lonely…You need other sources of counsel that are not the people that are the governance structure around you.” He spent two years in performance mode with his first board chair: “I always wanted to demonstrate how I was crushing it.” But he needed to be able to share real struggles.
19. No one on your staff is neutral. When you’re making strategic resource allocation or organizational design decisions, every member of the executive team has their own horse in the race. You’re the only one who owns the whole. (Yes, there are ways to increase ownership of the overall outcomes, but those have their own challenges.)
20. Peer connections are hard to find. Other CEOs are off frying their own fish, so they are rarely available when a peer is what you need. The same unwillingness to invest applies here. And the groups that do exist are a poor fit for a nonprofit CEO specifically, as they are either CEOs of business and don’t understand donors and boards, they are geographically limited to one market, or they are not curated to be the right mix of organizations to cultivate the conversations that are most needed.
21. Your friends do not have the context. The people who know the CEO best have no working knowledge of the organization, boards, or the sector. They can offer care, and they cannot offer counsel on the decision itself. CEOs have told me that even their spouses have tired of the conversation.
22. Every constituency has their own incentives other than the mission. Staff, board, donors, and partners each carry their own interests into the conversation. The CEO is the one person whose incentive is supposed to be the mission itself. In Episode 4, Olivia Mulerwa from Mission One said, “Everybody had a very specific point of view, because they had a vested interest.”
23. The board believes it has already solved this. Michael Martin of ECFA told me in an upcoming podcast that their member survey found boards rating their own care and engagement for their leader almost twice as high as the leaders themselves felt it. The support seems real to the people giving it and lacking to the person receiving it. Oof.

What Carrying It Alone Does to You

24. CEOs are often insecure. Insecurity is understandable in a CEO, because of the constant onslaught of items on this list: challenging decisions, ultimate responsibility, the lack of peer relationships, etc. This leads to conversations being avoided, decisions being delayed, and a staff culture that reads the leader's need and manages to it. A research frontier is if this is exacerbated for long-term CEOs and founders.
25. You are holding too much and delegating too little. This can be an understandable posture, given everything above. When the team is thin and the stakes are personal, the CEO pulls work back in and holds tightly onto it.

So, back to those two questions:  

• In your view, what is missing from this list? 
• And which one have I got wrong?

Drop me a reply here.

(I'm leading that CEO gathering in DC through Wednesday, so I may be slow coming back to you. But I will read every reply, as always.)

Thank you for what you’re leading.

Adam Jeske, The Nonprofit CEO Advisor

P.S. If someone else should know about the research for Peerless: Nonprofit CEOs and the Decisions They Carry Alone, pass this to them. They can subscribe here.