What drives innovation at nonprofits? Is it the power structure, the rules and regulations, the size? How much money you can throw at a problem? Most past research has asked how these variables affect innovation within the business sector. “What I’m starting to see is that it’s more about who works for the organization,” says Kristina Jaskyte, who studies nonprofits from the School of Social Work at the University of Georgia. “That human factor is almost more important than the resources an organization has.”
Her guinea pigs were affiliates of Communities in Schools, a nationwide network of nonprofit organizations that bring community support to public school students. For two years, she visited locally controlled, independently programmed organizations in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. She left questionnaires with every employee and board member and interviewed 79 executive directors, many of whom couldn’t wait to tell her what was new. She gathered enough data to distinguish different types of innovation: the administrative (a new organizational structure or administrative system) and the technological (a new program or service). Administrative innovation was associated with centralization and a new executive director. Transformational leadership was defined by both administrative and technological innovation.
Across widely different affiliates and programs—from turning a donated bus into a brightly colored mobile library in rural Georgia to providing mentoring and college scholarships to the children of fallen soldiers in metropolitan Florida—Jaskyte found similar leadership styles. Transformational leaders find ways to “capitalize on that creativity that employees have,” says Jaskyte. They create trusting relationships by “challenging the process, inspiring a shared vision, enabling others to act, modeling the way, and encouraging the heart.”
One such leader is Jon Heymann, CEO of Communities in Schools of Jacksonville, which runs the after-school programs that have become the standard in the city. “We have no canned programs,” Heymann says. “Anything we have done we’ve invented and designed ourselves.” He calls his direct reports “renegades” because “each one of them could run their own nonprofit. They are at times very hard to manage,” he says, “but I would rather have that than rubber stamps, where all of the ideas have to come from me. ”
Jaskyte hesitates to offer practical advice based on her findings. But to those executive directors who tell her they just don’t have time to pioneer new programs and processes while they’re busy trying to stay afloat, she counters that innovation would make everything else easier. Michael Austin, professor of nonprofit management in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees. “The most successful organizations, in terms of sustaining themselves, are the ones that are continuously innovating,” Austin says.
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.