Taking For-profit Know-how to the Nonprofit Sector

It’s no secret that an MBA is a perfect qualification for an employee seeking to work in the business world. Although business training or experience is not necessarily stressed in nonprofit organizations, this often puts them at a distinct disadvantage. The conventional caricature of nonprofits is that they attract people with lots of heart but not management skills. Why, after all, would business people and MBAs take skill sets that focus on profit and apply them to do what is literally the opposite? Promisingly, the tide is turning: People with for-profit skills are being welcomed more than ever before into the nonprofit space.

The Access Project works to improve health care in Rwanda and other African nations. To succeed in a nonprofit like Access, you might expect that being a doctor would be the perfect qualification. But that’s not necessarily the case. Right now, we need people who are excellent managers, who are able to run an organization efficiently, cost-effectively and with an eye on results. So in our case, a background in successfully running a business might be more desirable than a medical degree.

The skills needed in a given nonprofit will vary with the time and place, but overall it requires potential employees and managers to be intelligent and imaginative when thinking about how best to use their human resources. Here are three points for nonprofit managers to consider in building management skill when reviewing potential employees:

1. Choose the employee with the right skills. As in any situation, you should look for employees with an affinity and a genuine interest in what your organization is doing. When you consider the long hours and the generally lower compensation available to workers in the nonprofit environment, employees need to evince a calling to do the work. Real passion for the organization’s mission adds to camaraderie and boosts productivity.

However, commitment and interest alone are not enough. Skills and passion need to be matched in equal parts. To find the right fit, managers need to think about how the unique experiences potential employees have can relate to the kind of work you need them to do. Their experience in real estate, banking, IT, communications, management or law could be needed by organizations that work on environmental protection or health care reform.

2. Nonprofit managers should offer better compensation so that they can recruit and retain highly skilled individuals. There’s a convention about working in the nonprofit sector: that it must entail a major pay cut. This is changing, however. Business models are being recognized as the most efficient and productive ways to achieve overall success in many nonprofits, and what’s needed now is managers with private-sector experience who can oversee and manage the roll-out of programs that save lives and build capacity. In order to attract the right skilled specialists, managers need to adapt salary levels. Otherwise, it will be extremely difficult to attract the talented MBAs, successful results-oriented managers, and even the experienced high-level executives who are needed to drive projects to successful conclusions.

3. Consider pass-along skills. Often, we hire to fill an immediate need and look no further than a narrow skill set. But often an employee with broader experience can more positively impact an organization’s capacity. Consider employees who have varied backgrounds as a means of improving your team’s skills overall. An employee with broad business experience can share it and help create more depth and ability in your organization.

For example, we recently took on an intern from Pfizer who brought a decade of business experience to helping run our operations in Rwanda with fantastic results. Her IT and management experience not only was valuable in itself, but she was able to pass her expertise directly onto those Rwandans who worked alongside her in the health center in Mayange. Her presence made them better workers, and now they are passing what they know onto others.

Josh Ruxin is assistant clinical professor of public health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the Access Project in Rwanda.