‘Am I doing a good job? Am I making a difference?’ These are questions CEOs of philanthropies often ask themselves.
The reality is, it’s hard for these leaders to know how they’re performing. They can’t measure their performance through the objective metrics that corporate CEOs use, such as share price or revenue growth. And it can be difficult to get candid feedback from partners, who don’t want to risk irritating a donor.
A lack of literature on the topic doesn’t help. Countless books, studies, and MBA programs examine how to be an effective private sector CEO, and there are many thoughtful pieces on how to set up a foundation or define a philanthropic strategy. But how to be an effective foundation CEO remains largely unexplored.
This is the gap this report endeavors to help fill, and we hope it starts a conversation about what it means to be a successful philanthropy CEO.
We conducted a series of interviews with leading CEOs of philanthropic organizations to understand how they approach their role. These conversations revealed that the most admired CEOs rely heavily on three distinct skills: discernment, relational intelligence, and storytelling.
Discernment
Discernment involves seeing beyond what can be known or analyzed and draws upon wisdom, intuition, and reflection. “This is where you get to the art of philanthropy as opposed to anything approaching science,” said Rockefeller Brothers Fund President and CEO Stephen Heintz. Philanthropic CEOs face nearly limitless possibilities for where and how to deploy capital, and there is no clear right or wrong answer—but there certainly are better and worse answers, and they make themselves evident over time.
Excellent CEOs have the confidence to use their powers of discernment to set strategy and make big moves. They reflect on what they’ve observed and learned across sectors and draw on their emotional intelligence to assess what’s most likely to succeed with their team and partners. Then they go for it—even, and especially, when it’s difficult.
Relational intelligence
The CEOs we interviewed talked about the massive amount of time they spent cultivating and sustaining relationships to build the level of trust needed to truly lead—not merely steward—their organizations. Admired foundation CEOs accept that their resources are inadequate on their own and use their relational intelligence to forge high-profile partnerships to achieve impact. As MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey said, “We still want to take on the hardest issues out there, and we know we can only do that in genuine partnership. I tell my team often: ‘You have to make a really good case to go it alone.’”
These CEOs also overinvest in understanding the board or principals, because without shareholders, they are the ultimate arbiters of the foundation’s performance. And unlike corporate board members with standard financial metrics for the company’s performance, foundation board members and principals bring their own definitions of success to the table. Thus, building trusting, authentic relationships between the CEO and the board or principals, as well as among board members themselves, is critical.
Another way these leaders use their relational intelligence is in designing and empowering their top team. Most CEOs we spoke to strive to create a complementary group of leaders who work closely together in pursuit of shared goals and jointly navigate an increasingly complex external environment—much like a basketball team, where chemistry among the players and complementary skill sets, not one or two star players, lead to victory.
Storytelling
Philanthropy CEOs must have a compelling narrative to provide the rationale and urgency for the work they choose to do and to illustrate what success looks like. The CEOs we spoke to emphasized that this narrative must be deeply anchored in the philanthropy’s legacy and values while also being clear about how the CEO is trying to evolve the foundation going forward.
Once they’ve established this narrative, they need to adhere to it consistently and in every aspect of how they operate. Foundation CEOs are under constant pressure to change course as new issues emerge or become more urgent. But what we heard from our CEOs was to stay the course. As La June Montgomery Tabron, president and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, put it, “Your staff, grantees, and partners don’t care what you say; they look at what you do. And whenever you’re inconsistent, you have to start building trust and credibility all over again.”
Foundation staff feel committed to the mission and identify strongly with the work they do. As a result, they often expect their personal values to be reflected both by the institution and the CEO. CEOs need to demonstrate their uniquely personal connection to the institution’s narrative through specific actions, large and small.
While the skills outlined here are a critical part of being a successful philanthropy CEO, they are hardly the whole picture. The more we understand about how to do this job well, the better these leaders can support their organizations and the causes and communities they serve around the world.
Download the full report on which this article is based, Conviction and connection: What makes a great philanthropy CEO (2.5 MB).
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