Social Entrepreneurship

How Your Leader's Expertise Can Become Your Company's Weakness

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Leaders

Published October 29, 2009 @ 09:36AM PT

What's for sure is I'm a web guy. I run one technology startup, I manage a big chunk of another. I spend a huge part of my time keeping track of what's happening on the web, and I even do front end web design.

So why is it that one of the major weaknesses of my old Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern was our crappy web presence? I think It's a lesson in how the individual strengths of a leader can become the organization's weakness.

First the back story. I graduated from Northwestern in 2006. That year, I founded the Global Engagement Summit (GES) - a student run community development and social entrepreneurship training program - and the Center for Global Engagement, a study abroad program design center. I spent the next three years building CGE (CGE) and helping GES take root as a student organization.

Throughout all of this, I always had huge schemes for the websites. Functionality, design - it was all quite innovative. Unfortunately, for some reason we never really got past the "our website is just a blog" stage. It was fine, it delivered the information we needed, and we did a good job not spending money on something that wasn't going to be great. But it was still pretty lame.

Fast forward to today. I left NU a few months ago at the beginning of the summer. The student leadership of GES has been largely independent of me for a while, but this was the first time no one involved in the original founding of the organization was physical proximate. After a long recruitment process, CGE had new staff as well.

Despite the fact that none of the new leadership for either organization had any experience or even particularly a lot of interest with the web, one of their first orders of business was to update the web presence. In the last couple weeks, both have relaunched their websites. Both totally kick ass.

The website for the CGE's Global Engagement Summer Institute program:

The website for the Global Engagement Summit:

So if I'm supposedly the "web guy," why did the new, non-technically oriented staff just make my total web outputs for my former organizations look silly?

I think that, ironically, the strength of an individual organization leader can become that organization's weakness. The reason for that is that strong leadership - particularly in the nonprofit sector - is a lot about coordinating the good work of others, making sure that other leaders have agency, authority, and responsibility for big chunks of duty.

The temptation for a leader is to horde those responsibilities that relate to their own interests and skill areas. It makes sense from the standpoint of harnessing the assets of everyone involved, so no one things twice.

What can happen, though, is that those things which are natural and most comfortable for the leader slowly move further and further down the priority chain. Particularly if the leader in question is in a CEO or founder role which requires a lot of juggling, executing around specific concrete tasks - even those tasks directly in line with their skills - can become challenging.

What's more, unlike other areas in which smart leaders are comfortable asking for help, leaders who have a particular expertise tend not to want to ask for help in that area. They tend to be less comfortable to trust others to execute as well as they could, even if their nature is to trust in general.

The lesson for leaders is to think soberly and humbly about the nature of the commitments they have to their organizations. Every leader's arrangement is different, but to execute specific tasks as well as to coordinate the work of others requires investing a large amount in the leadership of others. What's more, I think the lesson is for leaders to think about how they arrange support around themselves that's related to their expertise, even if that feels counter intuitive when they're trying to save resources for elsewhere.

And finally - and this is the one piece of this that I think I got right with Northwestern - leaders need to not be afraid to hand over the reigns to new people with different skills, fresh ideas, and perhaps even different long-term goals.

Organizations, like people, evolve. I am all for strong entrepreneurs, but to keep organizations tethered to a single perspective forever is a conceit to vanity.

(Photo: subcircle)