Nonprofit Leadership Styles: Which Ones Work, and When Each One Backfires

If you moved from running programs into the executive director job, someone has probably handed you a list of styles and asked which one you are. That treats style as a personality type. Daniel Goleman and Paul Hersey, whose research appears below, treated it as behavior a leader can choose and learn.

Building range across these styles is a large part of how nonprofit leaders grow.

What Leadership Styles Work Best in Nonprofits?

No single style works best in nonprofits: the one that works fits the situation and the people in it. In Leadership That Gets Results (Harvard Business Review, 2000), Daniel Goleman drew on research with more than 3,000 executives and found that the leaders with the best results used most of six styles in any given week.

Paul Hersey, who developed the Situational Leadership model in 1969, also found no one best style: the right one depends on how able and willing a person is to do a specific task.

That fits a small nonprofit, where one executive director may train a volunteer in the morning and absorb a funding cut in the afternoon. Most new executive directors in the coaching applications we receive were promoted from programs, fundraising or operations, and two early patterns show up: changing everything at once, or waiting until months pass with no visible progress.

How Do Nonprofit Leadership Styles Compare?

Each nonprofit leadership style below traces back to a named thinker, linked in the sections that follow, and each helps in some situations and hurts in others. The last two columns are practical judgment for small nonprofits, not research findings, so test them against your own team.

When Do Servant and Transformational Styles Fit?

Servant and transformational leadership fit nonprofits where commitment carries the work, such as volunteer-heavy teams and small staffs. Robert K. Greenleaf coined servant leadership in his 1970 essay The Servant as Leader, and his test was whether the people served grow as persons, becoming healthier, wiser, freer and more autonomous.

The servant leader, as the Greenleaf Center puts it, shares power and puts the needs of others first. The risk comes when serving everyone becomes a reason to postpone a layoff, a program closure or a hard talk with a board member.

James V. Downton coined the term transformational leadership, and James MacGregor Burns developed it in 1978: leaders and followers raise each other to higher levels of motivation and morality. Bernard Bass extended it in 1985. It suits a capital campaign or a program launch.

Charismatic leadership is the cousin that worries boards. Max Weber described charismatic authority as resting on the leader’s personal appeal. In his account, it outlasts the leader only once it is routinized into rules and structures. An organization that works only while one person is in the room shows the pattern behind founder syndrome.

When Do Adaptive and Democratic Styles Fit?

Adaptive leadership fits problems with no known fix, and democratic leadership fits decisions that skilled people have time to shape. Ronald Heifetz of Harvard Kennedy School separates technical problems, which expertise can fix, from adaptive challenges, which require people to change their values, habits or ways of working.

In The Work of Leadership, first published in Harvard Business Review in 1997, Heifetz and Donald Laurie tell leaders to step back and watch the patterns, regulate the distress change creates and give the work back to the people, letting them define and solve the problem. A shrinking funding stream is adaptive work. Name the gap at a staff meeting, ask each program lead what would have to change in their own work and set a date for options.

Psychologist Kurt Lewin and his students Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White described democratic leadership in 1939, alongside autocratic and laissez-faire styles. Later research, summarized in Wikipedia’s overview of leadership styles, finds it works best when members are skilled and have time to deliberate. It stalls when roles are unclear, so settle who does what in a nonprofit before you ask for input. When you ask, say whether you are deciding, consulting or handing the decision over, so people know what weight their view carries.

When Is a Directive Style the Right Call?

A directive style is right in an emergency, when a decision cannot wait and people need clear instructions: a safety incident, or a lost grant that puts payroll at risk. Goleman lists it among his six styles as the coercive one, in which the leader demands immediate compliance. Hersey’s gentler version, telling, suits a person new to a task.

The risk is staying directive after the emergency passes. If every decision still runs through you a month later, staff stop raising problems early, and the hardest leadership challenges land on one desk. Name an end point when you switch to directive mode, and see the guide to managing a nonprofit crisis for the communication side.

How Do You Widen Your Leadership Range?

You widen your leadership range by naming the style you default to, trying another one on a low-stakes situation and asking how it landed. Goleman’s article explains how leaders who lack a style can add it to their repertory. A thinking partner speeds this up, because a habit is hard to see from inside it.

The Range Check

1. Name the problem. Emergency, routine task or adaptive challenge?
2. Look at the people. How able and willing is each person for this task?
3. Pick this week’s style. Direct in the emergency, coach or delegate as readiness grows, open the hard questions to the team.
4. Review it. Ask one person how the decision landed, and adjust.

A Center for Nonprofit Coaching coach does not tell you which style to use. Each session opens with what matters most that week, works through questions that show the situation from new angles and closes with one or two small commitments. Six sessions will not remake how you lead, but they can show you your patterns. See how coaching differs from mentoring.

Questions to ask yourself

• Which style did you use in your last three hard decisions, and did each situation call for it?
• Which decision are you making alone that the people closest to the work could make better?

Frequently Asked Questions

If you are the executive director: run one decision this week through the Range Check and try the style you use least. If you chair the board: ask your executive director which situations feel hardest to lead right now.

Center for Nonprofit Coaching volunteer coaches donate their time, which is why six sessions of one-to-one coaching for executive directors cost $300, $400 or $600 depending on your operating budget, 85%+ below market rate. Start your application, or begin with the free Purpose-Driven Leadership guide.