Ultimate Guide to Nonprofit Executive Leadership Coaching
Photo credit daniel-minarik
In the past 20 years, coaching has exploded as a topic. Coaching is now one of the leading frameworks for personal and professional transformation and growth.
It’s especially caught on for nonprofit leaders because of the growth and professionalization of the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. Despite its popularity, leadership coaching remains a bit of a mystery to many people. But it doesn’t need to be.
This article will fully explain and explore nonprofit coaching, including what it is and what it isn’t, and why it can be an effective and affordable solution for retention, performance, and morale.
You’ll learn what makes up the coaching experience, what makes it different from consulting, training, teaching, or therapy, and whether it’s right for you.
We’ll cover:
What Is Leadership Coaching and How Is It Beneficial?
Let’s start with the basics.
What is a leadership coach?
A leadership coach is someone with expertise and experience in leadership who offers to help others transform their personal or professional skillset, mindset, or performance. Coaches do not need to be subject matter experts! The coaching field has exploded in growth in the past two decades and many certification programs exist, but there is no requirement that a “coach” be certified in any one approach or method.
If you’re a nonprofit executive leader seeking or considering seeking a coach, you’ll want a coach with direct and relevant experience. Ideally, your coach should have 3-5+ years of experience as an executive or executive director of a nonprofit organization. Simply being a founder, a board member, or having a long-term nonprofit role often is not enough. You want someone who has hands-on experience with the unique challenges of running a nonprofit.
Some coaches specialize in a certain area like career coaching, change management, career transition, diversity, equity and inclusion, or even overcoming trauma. Referrals can be a powerful way to create your early pool of potential coaches.
What is leadership coaching?
Leadership coaching is a process and discipline, sometimes used with tools (360 Degree reviews, assessments), to help people push through mindset, skillset or experience challenges or growth. “Leadership” skills include a wide range of social, emotional, and professional attributes and behaviors that help a person be successful leading teams and organizations. Leadership coaching helps identify the critical leadership qualities and behaviors needed for success in life or a particular role and helps the coachee build toward agreed-upon goals.
Coaching packages tend to be for 6-12 months. The leader and the coach must feel like it is a mutually respectful and professional engagement. Without trust, coaching will fail. Whether the employer or the individual is paying, confidentiality is sacred between the coach and the coachee.
Who can benefit from leadership coaching and how?
Everyone needs and gets help on their way to excellence. This help can come from education, experience, mentorship, and—as your career progresses—coaching.
Coaching is designed to help people, and therefore organizations, achieve goals. Sometimes we are held back by mindset issues or limiting beliefs like low confidence or imposter syndrome. Or you may be trying to lead in a field dominated by people who don’t look like you or even to overcome a career setback.
There is a maxim in leadership coaching: “What got you here, won’t get you there.”
Organizations invest in coaching support for their staff because they see someone’s potential. Leaders often invest in coaching for themselves because they have challenges or opportunities, and they want to reach their own full potential.
Coaching will likely not be a good option for low-performing employees or leaders. But for high performers ready to get to the next level, coaching can be transformational.
This is especially true for nonprofit leaders like executive directors. Sometimes nonprofit leaders are working in incredible isolation because of how nonprofits are structured (for example, all-volunteer boards). So having a leadership coach can be invaluable—giving leaders a trusted “co-pilot” who understands them and is committed to their growth and success.
How Much Does Nonprofit Leadership Coaching Cost?
The beautiful thing about the nonprofit sector is that mentorship and leadership support are all around us. Every now and then you can find a wise or experienced nonprofit leader to coach or support you for free as a way of donating or giving back. Granted this is rare, but it does happen.
In most cases, though, leadership coaching is a paid, time-limited engagement. Generally, formal coaching is a structured 6-month-minimum process, which is why it may be hard to get for free.
If you have the budget, I strongly recommend that you pay for coaching. A formal, paid arrangement:
Honors and values the experience and expertise of the coach.
Makes clear that the coach-coachee relationship is mutual, which avoids creating an unintentional power imbalance that can occur with pro-bono coaching.
Coaching pricing is typically by the package, not by the hour. Some coaches may let you purchase sessions a la carte based on your finances or allow you to buy one-off sessions after a coaching package is complete.
On the lower end of the spectrum, coaches for nonprofit leaders may charge $2,500-$5,000 for a 6-month contract and nearly double that for a 12-month contract. Contracts longer than a year are rare for nonprofits. From this base pricing, costs can go all the way up to what coaches charge for the private sector, sometimes $40k or even higher for a 6-month contract. Coaching packages at the high end are typically purchased by very large nonprofits with relationships with the coach and may even have a funder offering to cover the expenses.
Some foundations do provide additional coaching resources, referrals, or funds to support grantees. When considering coaching, it’s worth checking with your main funders to see what is available.
Four things that impact nonprofit leadership coaching prices
Nonprofit leadership coaching, like all coaching in the US, has a wide range in costs. The four main factors that may impact your price is 1) who is paying, 2) the size of your organization, and 3) the size of the coaching firm, 4) the prominence of the coach.
Who is paying: It is not uncommon for leadership coaches to cut a deal or offer a discount to nonprofit leaders if they are footing the bill as an individual (instead of the organization paying). This is as a courtesy only and based on an assumption that nonprofit leaders are paid less than their private sector or even government counterparts.
The size of your organization: The larger your organizational budget is, the higher the stakes and the higher the ability to pay. So firms of any size may charge large organizations more than small ones. Many coaches have sliding scale pricing for organizations based on budget and size. Many coaches will charge foundation leaders the most because foundations are structured to give money away and don’t need to fundraise like other nonprofits.
The size of the coaching firm: The higher the costs a coaching firm has, the higher their fees are likely to be. So if you go with a bigger coaching consultancy your price will likely be higher than a small firm like Mind the Gap Consulting. Bigger firms and the coaches affiliated with them aren’t better or worse, but those larger firms tend to have additional costs for marketing and other expenses that increase price.
The prominence of the coach: Every sector has its gurus, and these higher profile coaches may command much higher prices (such as $40K for a 6-month contract). Big-name coaches may or not be better, but they feel like they can charge higher prices because of their name recognition and therefore take fewer clients by choice. On the other hand, small businesses like mine that work with nonprofits of all sizes may price our packages on a scale.
Nonprofit Executive Leadership Coaching Infographic - Mind the Gap Consulting
What Happens in a Coaching Engagement?
If you’ve never worked with a coach, it may not be clear what leadership coaches actually do. Coaching is such a broad field that it can still be nebulous for those who’ve been coached before.
To break down the coaching process and what to expect, let’s walk through the typical services offered by a nonprofit leadership coach. (Note that corporate executive coaches tend to have many more tools and tactics to help clients…and they charge accordingly!)
Step 1: Coaching agreement
A coaching agreement may be as simple as a standard legal contract. But many coaches ask you to sign a less legalese document that is more centered on your personal commitment to the engagement. It is a mutual agreement about how the coach and coachee will behave. This includes honoring appointments, doing homework, and being honest with each other.
Step 2: Assessment and discovery
At the beginning of many coaching “engagements” (a term used to describe the period from when the contract is signed until when the scope of work is completed), a coach may hold a discovery call or calls with the coachee and sometimes a few others in the leadership team (board chair, deputy director or a program or development director if you have them). For the vast majority of nonprofits, this will be a call with one or two people to help the coach get a sense of the “scope of work,” including immediate and upcoming challenges and opportunities for the coachee.
Coaches generally couple the discovery call with an assessment. This can be super informal, even a short interview between the coach and the coachee, possibly using a checklist of questions. Or it could be a full 30+ question survey with prompts designed to tease out what the coachee’s pain points are and what the desired end state will be.
Remember, coaching is about personal and professional growth and goal achievement.
The coach will synthesize the discovery call(s) and the assessment and then use the first coaching session to get clear on the goals and objectives for the engagement. Normally this is summarized in some form of coaching plan.
Step 3: Coaching plan
Once the discovery and assessment are done, the coach may pull them together in a roadmap of what the coach and coachee will do in their time together. A coaching plan normally includes smaller steps toward a larger goal. (For example, a step could be to: Revise coachee’s resume to reflect the coachee’s growing and globally-significant role and career ambitions.)
Step 4: The meetings
Meetings can be of any frequency. They can be in person or virtual or even by phone. Typically coaching calls are monthly but some people prefer to meet more frequently, such as bi-weekly or even weekly if there is a more acute issue. Meetings are typically around an hour long.
It’s worth noting that coaches are not paid by the hour, even if you only meet with them for an hour at a time. You are paying a couch for the journey—the personal and/or career transformation.
In between sessions, the coach will be thinking about tools, assignments, homework, and other elements of the last and the next session. The coachee typically has assignments to work on too. Many coaches help coachees toward agreed upon goals like progress toward developing certain skills or behaviors, or building specific habits for strong leadership.
It is also very common for coaching sessions to be different every time. Some engagements are very flexible and fluid with the coach checking in at the top of the meeting with: “So what’s on your mind this week?” or “So how are you doing on your journey.”
Coaches can serve an important role just by listening. They look and listen for patterns in your thinking, limiting beliefs, themes, worries, or hangups. The act of listening by the coach can be profound research!
With my coaching clients, I try to constantly bring us back to the original purpose of hiring me. Sometimes it’s low motivation or burnout. Other times it's purely wanting to nail the role of an executive director. It’s ok to meander into other topics, but I try to ask the coachee if they want to circle back to our goals, of if they want to focus on what’s on their mind that day.
Coaching is most successful when it is helping solve a problem, not when it’s trying to adhere the original intake form. When you build rapport with your coach, and/or if you are not the one paying for each session, it’s easy for each meeting to become more conversational and less focused. Try to gut check frequently to be sure what you are getting from coaching is what you want!
Additional tools used in coaching
The list of tools a nonprofit leadership coach may use is too exhaustive for this article, but here are a few to consider.
360 Degree review
It is very common for a nonprofit leader and coachee to request, or for the coach to suggest, a 360-degree review (also abbreviated as “a 360”). This is a short survey sent to people below, above, and at peer level with the leader within the organization. Especially in the case of executive directors, the survey may include feedback from a few “external” stakeholders too, like board members or coalition partners. This 360-degree view of the leader’s leadership helps inform the coaching engagement.
A full 360-degree review can be expensive and time-consuming. Prices range from $2k to $30K. Surveys can be conducted with Google Surveys or elaborate software. Often, the larger and more sophisticated the firm, the more sophisticated and expensive the tools.
I strongly believe that the coach and the questions are what matter most, more than any bells and whistles. Participants are typically anonymous but not always. The results are aggregated, synthesized, simplified, and presented to the coachee. The presentation can include raw comments, both positive and critical, and even charts.
360-degree reports can be VERY difficult to receive. If you agree to a 360 review, be ready for some humility and you should be very open to feedback. Your coach should help you navigate how fraught this can be.
Productivity and time management tools
Some coaches will identify that productivity or motivation is a challenge for the coachee. If that’s the case for you, the coach will have a suite of tools and tactics to help you grow in this area.
Decision-making tools
Some leaders struggle with decision-making. They move too fast, too slow, or too all alone. Coaches will help identify tools to remove bias from decision-making or to empower you to combine your instinct with data and other assets to be a better leader
Finding a Leadership Coach
There are many ways to find a leadership coach. I offer coaching for nonprofit executive directors, other nonprofit leaders, board chairs, and founders.
One of the best ways to find a coach is through referrals or word of mouth. You will almost always have better luck if someone you know, like, and trust refers you to someone they personally have used.
A referral doesn’t have to come from someone you personally know though. Check in with nonprofit executive directors in your sector or community for referrals.
You can also reach out to the local Center for Nonprofits in your region. There is a nonprofit association or “center” in almost every state. Find yours here. You can also check with your local community foundation or check out the useful list of nonprofif consultants at Nonprofit.ist.
Choosing the right coach for you
Just like with hiring, you’ll want to interview at least 2-3 coaches before choosing one.
The first step in finding the right coach for you is understanding what your coaching goals are:
What will success look like for you?
Are you focused on setting and achieving goals, or are you looking to delve into mindset challenges that may be holding you back?
Are you looking to build your career, your organization, or both?
Are you navigating a rough patch? Or are you in a steady state and looking to challenge yourself and get to the next level?
Once you have a sense of your own goals, you can ask targeted questions to make sure a coach can help you succeed. A good coach will also know if they are a bad fit and hopefully will refer you on to someone better.
3 key questions to ask leadership coaches
“What is your coaching approach and style?”
With this question, you’ll normally get a coach telling you exactly how they operate. Are they hands-on or more reflective? Are they focused on measurable results or more touchy-feely outcomes? Hopefully, you know yourself well enough to know how you like getting support and feedback.
“How flexible are you with meetings?”
Most coaches prefer to schedule recurring sessions in a set time slot either weekly, every other week, or monthly. But some coaches are more flexible and willing to set meetings based on your ever-changing availability. Regardless of scheduling style, make sure there is room for the occasional (though hopefully infrequent) call if you are facing a really tough decision or challenge. It may cost extra, but some coaches are willing to be available between sessions.
“How much experience have you had with my sector/issue/challenge?”
Some coaches are excellent at nearly every coaching engagement because they are using time-and battle-tested tools and techniques. But sometimes you really want someone who has helped others with situations close to yours because it adds a lot of value. My favorite coach was a lesbian former military officer who specialized in helping corporate C-Suite leaders and entrepreneurs. She had little to no coaching experience in nonprofits, but her approach, experience and instincts were amazing. I would hire her again in a minute!
Conclusion
The truth is, being a nonprofit leader is not easy. All of us who’ve been in that role, especially as executive directors, are familiar with just how all-consuming and challenging running a nonprofit can be. But having a partner at your side—an impartial guide whose only goal is to help you rise to the occasion—can make all the difference.
