Here are the five essential skills and qualities that comprise exceptional leadership, which Leading Edge strives to foster in our executive programs.

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The CEO Survey was created to help Leading Edge understand who is leading Jewish nonprofits, how they got there, what their experience is like, what their common strengths and struggles are, how they experience their partnerships with their boards and senior teams, what kinds of support they most need, and who is (and isn’t yet) well represented among them.

222 CEOs responded to the survey in May 2022. (We use the word “CEO” to refer to any topmost professional nonprofit leader, including those with “Executive Director” titles or other equivalent titles.)

CEOs in the first two years of their roles need extra support.

CEOs we surveyed are not representative (in demographic identity terms) of either the North American Jewish community or the Jewish nonprofit workforce. Men lead the organizations surveyed disproportionately to both the population and the gender breakdown of these organizations’ teams. Jews of Color and people with disabilities are also underrepresented.

CEOs are overwhelmingly likely to feel favorable about their relationships with their boards, but less likely to feel favorable about the board’s performance of their core functions—fundraising, giving useful evaluation feedback to the CEO, and being partners in setting a long-term vision and strategy.

CEOs promoted from within their organizations are less likely to struggle with fundraising and board partnership.

CEOs with past experience serving on a board tend to have better experiences with board partnership.

CEOs’ ability to disconnect from work is related to their employees’ ability to do the same.

There is a perception gap between employees and CEOs regarding open communication and the organization’s concern for employee well-being.

CEOs and employees are most aligned regarding organizational DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging) change and inclusivity, as well as risk-taking.

CEO Survey Report 2022—What Is it Like to Lead Jewish Nonprofits.pdf

This report shares findings from Leading Edge’s second CEO Survey, drawing on the experiences of 222 leaders of Jewish nonprofits from around North America.

What Is It Like to Lead Jewish Nonprofits? Results from the Second Annual CEO Survey

Report

This resource lays out six steps for boards and leaders to create and implement a formal executive evaluation process. These steps will help guide you toward an evaluation process that is (A) appropriate for your organization’s culture and needs; (B) tailored to your organization’s clear and specific goals; and (C) equitable, accurate, and unbiased. 

This resource also includes sample questions you may want to consider including in your evaluation tool, and additional resources that may be helpful to consider.

[FINAL] CEO Performance Evaluation 2022_UPDATED.pdf

This resource lays out six steps for boards and leaders to create and implement a formal executive evaluation process.

Great performance requires great feedback. That’s true for everyone—including leaders.

How to Create a CEO Performance Evaluation

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The purpose of this document is to provide prospective CEOs with a tool to evaluate job opportunities and determine their desire to lead that specific organization. (The term CEO is used to describe the topmost professional at an organization. This includes Executive Directors, Presidents, CEOs, etc.)

Learn how to frame a personal reflection; use the included rubric to structure your evaluation of the organization's position; find out what kinds of documents to review; and review key questions to ask of the leadership team, board, and search committee.

CEO Interview Tool 2022_UPDATED.pdf

Whether you're being considered for a CEO position yourself or mentoring someone else in that situation, this document will help you systematically think through the question: is this executive leadership position the right match?

An Executive Resource from Leading Edge. Whether you're being considered for a CEO position yourself or mentoring someone else in that situation, this document will help you systematically think through the question: Is this executive leadership position the right match?

Do I Want This Job? A Rubric for Jewish Nonprofit CEO Candidates

This report shares findings from the pilot CEO Survey from Leading Edge. The CEO Survey was created to help Leading Edge understand the unique experiences of Jewish nonprofit CEOs, their relationships with their boards and senior teams, and their most common strengths and struggles. It can also help CEOs understand and contextualize their own experiences, and help boards, funders, and other stakeholders in the Jewish communal sector to understand the needs and challenges of leaders today.

155 CEOs responded to the survey in May 2021. (We use the word “CEO” to refer to any topmost professional nonprofit leader, including those with “Executive Director” titles or other equivalent titles.)

What is it Like to Lead Jewish Nonprofits.pdf

This report shares findings from the pilot CEO Survey from Leading Edge.

This report shares findings from the pilot CEO Survey from Leading Edge. The CEO Survey was created to help Leading Edge understand the unique experiences of Jewish nonprofit CEOs, their relationships with their boards and senior teams, and their most common strengths and struggles.

What is it Like to Lead Jewish Nonprofits? Results from the Pilot CEO Survey

Most people working at Jewish nonprofits are women. But most CEOs of Jewish nonprofits—especially at the largest organizations—are men. In 2019, Leading Edge launched an investigation to better understand why that is, and how the field might begin to change it. Building on the work of Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community, SRE Network, and many others, Leading Edge partnered with The Starfish Institute, an organization that has developed a methodology for applying network science to understanding complex social problems at a systemic level.

Together, over the course of 18 months, we engaged over 1,200 people to posit 71 causes of the gap. We then used quantitative network analysis to identify five “keystones” among them.

Keystones (a term borrowed from the concept of a “keystone species” in ecology) are factors that have high “reach,” which means they affect many other issues, and high “leverage,” which means they are influenced by few others. Solving them may be difficult, but doing so could create a large ripple effect on other causes of the problem.

The Five Keystone Causes and Opportunities:

The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership — An Ecosystem View-2021-10-21.pdf

Addressing five causes can make significant progress in closing the persistent and large gender gap among CEOs at Jewish nonprofit organizations.

The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership: An Ecosystem View

Leading Edge commissioned a series of case studies profiling CEO transitions at six different major Jewish organizations across the country: 

Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership

What we learned were valuable lessons about how Jewish organizations can best prepare and position leaders to succeed. 

These case studies offer a candid, personal look at the inner workings of a CEO transition process. 

They are rich with first person accounts from key figures involved — the outgoing and incoming CEOs, board members, search committee members, and others — and address key issues for Jewish organizations today, including gender and generational differences in approach to leadership, organizational culture change, best practices for search committees, and more.

Case-Studies-FINAL.pdf

These case studies offer a candid, personal look at the inner workings of CEO transition processes at six major Jewish organizations.

We developed six case studies on recent CEO successions in major Jewish nonprofit organizations. Each highlights fascinating and unique stories of leadership transitions and offers bright spots and lessons to the sector.

CEO Succession: Case Studies of Excellence from the Jewish Nonprofit Sector

As President & CEO of Leading Edge, I represent a minority of women who hold top leadership positions in the Jewish nonprofit sector. While approximately 70% of our sector’s workforce identifies as women, women represent only 30% of our CEOs. At Leading Edge, an organization that focuses on building a robust leadership pipeline for Jewish nonprofits, I am acutely aware that I have broken through what is still a glass ceiling in 2018.

Of course, executive leadership is not the only site of gender disparity. Consider, for instance, organizational budgets. Data show that male-led organizations have an average budget size almost three times that of female-led organizations.

With these challenges in mind, Leading Edge applied a more focused gender equity lens to our 2018 Employee Experience Survey. We did so by integrating survey questions that would shed light on women’s experiences in the workplace. We were able to filter for women’s answers using an individual’s response to our gender question. We also ensured that our survey allowed for the expression of a range of gender identities beyond the usual “Woman,” “Man,” options and consulted with Keshet on best practices.

A total of 7,300 professionals across 105 Jewish organizations participated in this year’s survey. The responses we received were similar to industry standards. Still, the pain points are difficult to digest. Here are some significant gender-related findings:

1. Women experience a disconnect between their desire to advance professionally and their perceived opportunities for advancement.

Our survey found that despite their desire to advance, women believe they have fewer opportunities to do so than their male colleagues (this finding is supported by other research, including this treasure-trove from Advancing Women Professionals). In Leading Edge’s review of comments related to this topic, we found that female participants described both a lack of opportunities for advancement as well as a culture that demands more sacrifice from women, making healthy work-life integration even more elusive. For men, comments described primarily a lack of desire to stay within the sector. This is an area that merits further action, as its impact can be fateful. If women, in particular, do not see advancement opportunities that could fit into their lives, their aspirations for leadership may be quashed.

2. Women feel less psychologically safe in our workplaces than men.

The survey assessed psychological safety by posing questions about people’s comfort speaking up, providing feedback to others, and sharing potentially unpopular opinions. Across sectors, when it comes to attitudes around psychological safety, research shows that, in general, women are less comfortable speaking up in the workplace. They often worry about how they will be perceived, while men tend to be more secure in revealing what is on their minds. This disparity shapes our organizational cultures in profound ways and indicates that there is still work to be done to promote greater psychological safety in our workplaces.

3. Setting and discussing compensation is a common pain point for all managers, but female employees, in particular, feel unclear about how compensation and raises are determined.

Our survey found that men are 12% more likely than women to understand how compensation, salary, and raises are set at their organization. We believe this reality may be because more men hold leadership positions within Jewish organizations, so they are privy to such information or are the decision-makers for financial matters. Jewish organizations overall need to prioritize how they determine and communicate compensation philosophies to make our sector more equitable.

4. Male respondents feel less positive about the leadership of female CEOs than male CEOs.

A growing body of research shows that people assume the competence of male leadership but scrutinize or question women leaders until they prove themselves. The data in our survey seems consistent with this unconscious bias and the differences in how gender impacts perceptions of leaders. Being aware of such biases is a positive first step in ameliorating them. What we want and need, fundamentally, is to expand our mental models of what a leader looks like and who a leader is. The Jewish community needs a multiplicity of voices to lead us into the future, and we need to deploy all of our available talent in service of achieving our collective mission.

Like so many sectors in the United States, the Jewish nonprofit sector must do better to diminish the gender disparities within our field. There is no magic bullet for achieving equity. Creating a systemic shift requires an ongoing commitment from leaders who are willing to place equitable workplace culture at the forefront of their agendas. It demands radical patience and a willingness to stay the course.

At the same time, the simplest nudges could have a huge impact.

For instance, the Leading Edge Survey also found that in our sector, male executives more often have the title “President & CEO” while female executives are more often called “Executive Director,” even when they lead organizations of the same size.

We at Leading Edge are not immune to the unconscious bias that fuels this disparity. Prior to these findings, my title had been Executive Director. After we saw this data, the Leading Edge board voted to change my title to President & CEO. In making this change, our board was clear and unequivocal that I had earned this title, and I have a newfound appreciation for the impact of these kinds of nudges. These are more than cosmetic changes; titles go a long way in signaling value and leveling the playing field.

The research presented here shines a light on the many growth opportunities for all of our organizations.

Small steps matter. By identifying the inequities in our system, we can begin to fix them.

This article originally appeared in eJewish Philanthropy on December 3, 2018.

While approximately 70% of our sector’s workforce identifies as women, women represent only 30% of our CEOs.

Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Understanding Gender Inequities in the Jewish Communal Workforce

“Too often boards turn every succession into an emergency because they fail to plan in advance.”

“The board has one employee: the CEO.”

CEOSearchCommitteeGuide.pdf

Leading Edge partnered with a Senior Editor from Harvard Business Review to distill the most important elements of running a successful nonprofit CEO search.

Over the next few years the vast majority of Jewish nonprofits will need to hire new CEOs. Ensuring the right CEO is in place is one of the board's primary duties. This guide lays out the known best practices for CEO searches and how they might be applied to the Jewish nonprofit sector.

CEO Search Committee Guide

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