Financial Leadership:
Ensuring Strong Nonprofit Financial Leadership Financial management is key to an organization’s success but it is not the same as financial leadership. Collecting financial data, submitting financial reports, and finding solutions to financial issues are the purview of financial management. The focus of financial leadership is to guide the organization to ensure sustainability. Nonprofits are businesses and the chief executive officer, or CEO is responsible for the financial leadership of the organization. Leaders of nonprofits are not “running anti-businesses…they are running nonprofit businesses” (Bell & Schaffer, 2005). Nonprofit organizations must ensure their CEO is a strong financial leader.
Chief Executive Officer “Simply stated, most nonprofit CEOs are at the epicenter of the organization, commanding substantial authority, and assuming primary responsibility for organizational success” (Kearns, et al., 2015). The CEO
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In their guide to nonprofit financial leadership, they list the following four steps: 1) ensure accuracy, 2) assess, 3) plan, and 4) communicate. Accurate data is required to assess financial health. Planning is not possible without assessing where you are and where you want or need to go. Finally, nothing can be accomplished without clear and open communication. It is always preferable to have a single point of accountability for any job or task, but that is not always possible. For example, the board of directors is responsible for engaging an auditor but “some boards are either too busy, too uninterested, or too intimidated to take the lead in an auditing relationship. It then falls to the CEO, who often delegates it to the CFO” (McLaughlin, 2010, pg. 117). The CFO or chief financial officer is a senior executive responsible for the organization’s financial