Effective Nonprofit Executive Teams

Regardless of your organization’s size or stage of growth, this special collection about nonprofit executive teams offers practical advice for getting the most from work your team does together.

Download a PDF of the special collection

Executive Team Effectiveness Toolkit

Our latest guide, the Executive Team Effectiveness Toolkit, walks nonprofit leaders and their executive teams through five steps that will help them improve their performance. Tools and perspectives from nonprofit peers round out the experience, offering nonprofit leaders and teams templates to put to use today and firsthand experience with and approaches to applying them.

Use the toolkit

Increasing Nonprofit Executive Team Effectiveness

By Libbie Landles-Cobb, Henry Barmeier, and Kirk Kramer

A nonprofit executive team's effectiveness is essential for an organization's success. Yet often these teams underperform for a variety of reasons. The five steps laid out here can help nonprofit executive teams move from underperforming to high-performing in their work to advance their organizations' missions. Read more >>

Team members seated at a meeting table


How to Integrate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into Everyday Operations

Maria HernandezMaria Hernandez

By Maria Hernandez, President and Chief Operating Officer, Impact4Health

Nonprofit leaders committed to integrating diversity, equity, and inclusion into their organizations will need to adopt new practices and behaviors to live into this goal. Read more >>

How to Support Effective Dynamics in Nonprofit Executive Teams

Q&A with Peter Thies, President and Partner, The River Group

In this conversation with Bridgespan Partner Kirk Kramer, Peter Thies, president of Boston-based consultancy The River Group, offers a glimpse inside his playbook for developing effective nonprofit executives teams, highlighting the team dynamics that support collaboration. Read more >>

Peter ThiesPeter Thies

How to Lead Effective Nonprofit Executive Team Meetings

Patrick LencioniPatrick Lencioni

Founder and president of The Table Group and best-selling author Patrick Lencioni writes in Death By Meeting that meetings often suffer from two problems: they're boring and lack context and purpose. Bridgespan's Libbie Landles-Cobb shares his solutions and suggests other practices that can transform meetings from time sinks into opportunities to really get things done. Read more >>

How to Optimize Nonprofit Executive Team Composition

Q&A with Nicki Roth, Senior Consultant, Paradox Strategies

Careful assessment of what you need to lead your organization over the long haul provides a good starting point from which to consider who and what roles should be on your executive team.
Read more >>

Nicki RothNicki Roth


How to Define the Work of Nonprofit Executive Teams

Ruth WagemanRuth Wageman


Q&A with Ruth Wageman, Director, Team Diagnostics LLC and Director, ReThink Health Stewardship 

Leadership expert Ruth Wageman and Bridgespan Partner Libbie Landles-Cobb discuss how to get teams focused on the priorities that will make the most of their valuable time. Read more >>

How to Lead High-Performing Nonprofit Executive Teams

By Roxane White, Founder and CEO, Strategy with Rox

Roxane White, former CEO and president of the nonprofit Nurse-Family Partnership, shares approaches she's used to encourage high-performance from the executive teams with which she has worked. Read more >>

Roxane WhiteRoxane White


Download the Effective Nonprofit Executive Teams: Full Collection

Please fill out the form below to download the collection. We use the information we collect to help us improve our content and to inform our funders about the impact of our work. We will never share your personal information with any third party without your permission.

If you'd rather not share your information, you can download a PDF the collection by clicking here.