This week, as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang abruptly resigned following news of his extramarital affairs with a suspected Chinese spy and multiple employees, corporate America was delivered a harsh lesson on the importance of succession plans. 

The Jewish nonprofit world, however, might have received the message in a far less scandalous way: through a new Leading Edge study of nonprofit boards that found that only 8% of those surveyed had a CEO succession plan, and 11% an emergency succession plan. This is far below the levels of non-Jewish nonprofits, roughly a third of which had such plans.

“Every CEO is going to leave,” Alicia Oberman, Leading Edge’s senior advisor on board leadership, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “You want to be prepared for when that CEO leaves.”

Leading Edge describes the study, released yesterday, as the largest of its kind on Jewish nonprofit board members to date. The study also stands out for asking ordinary board members about their experience. Until now, most research on nonprofit leadership surveyed only CEOs and board chairs, leaving a significant gap in organizations’ understanding.  

By surveying board members, Leading Edge found that the three main leadership roles in an organization — CEOs, board chairs and board members — can often describe what sounds like three different boards. While chairs reported the most favorable experience on nearly every question, CEOs reported the least favorable, with board members landing somewhere in between, a trend Oberman likened to “Goldilocks.”

The perceptual gaps between CEOs and board chairs were often wide. For instance, while 95% of chairs said board meetings are a productive use of time, 68% of CEOs agreed. On overall board effectiveness, 81% of chairs responded favorably, compared with 64% of CEOs. On a third of the questions, there was more than a 16-point gap between chairs and CEOs, Oberman told eJP, describing that gap as indicative of a larger communication breakdown.

“You’re always gonna have a gap between what the board chair experiences and what the board members experience because…you have someone who’s talking to the CEO on a regular basis, and then you have someone who’s coming to a board meeting four times a year,” she said. “There’s always going to be, and there probably should be, a disparity, but it shouldn’t be that extreme, and it certainly shouldn’t be between the CEO and the board chair, who are really supposed to be the ones working in partnership.”

Board members’ views were telling, too. While 95% of chairs said they would recommend their board as a great place to serve, 81% of members said the same, meaning roughly 1 in 5 would not.

In some cases, divides between CEOs and chairs in the organizations Leading Edge surveyed were seemingly wider than in the nonprofit sector overall. Asked whether their board values diversity in its membership, 92% of chairs agreed, compared with 68% of CEOs, a 24-point gap. Among U.S. nonprofits surveyed by BoardSource, the same gap is seven points. However, Oberman cautioned that the two surveys — of national nonprofits and Jewish nonprofits — used different questions and so could not be neatly mapped onto each other. 

Oberman attributed much of the disconnect to misaligned expectations and a reluctance to have difficult conversations, a reluctance she said can also keep boards from planning for succession.

And while organizations with a written onboarding guide scored five to seven points higher across all of the measured factors, and the few with a CEO succession plan scored four to seven points higher, Oberman warned that the study found correlations, not a neat formula to improve board operations. The presence of a succession plan often indicates boards that are more willing to have difficult conversations, she said, which improves operations overall.

While addressing many of these issues requires serious thought and structural changes, Oberman said that the survey did reveal one “quick fix”: socializing.

Boards that spent five to nine hours a year together socially reported the highest favorability on most questions, she said, while boards that met virtually most of the time scored lowest on nearly every board-wide question.