Practitioners: Linda Whitlock

To help practitioners achieve high performance throughout their organizations, Social Enterprise offers Executive Education programs and opportunities for interaction with students on field-based projects. Linda Whitlock has worked with HBS at key stages in the development of her organization and her career.

Linda Whitlock

President and CEO, Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston

When I first arrived at Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston, I knew that it was a strong and reputable organization that had undergone much growth. As the new leader, I needed to think strategically about how to manage such growth, so I called Jim Cash, a friend and now retired HBS faculty member. He referred me to the Social Enterprise Initiative.

Five months after I arrived as president and CEO, a team of students came to work with our senior management team, our board, and me on one of our strategic challenges-moving from being an organization of loose affiliations among our sites, with an unclear definition of what the main office was meant to be, toward becoming an integrated, well-aligned, strategic network. Their work helped us move closer to that goal, but it's always a work in progress.

That was six years ago. We're now at the early stages of a major comprehensive fundraising campaign that is reputed to be among the largest that any human service organization in this country has ever undertaken. Since this would be a major new focus of my efforts, I decided to attend Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management (SPNM) at Harvard Business School, to help me prepare to meet this, our next challenge.
I came to SPNM to focus on my role moving forward in the organization, and how I would be able to continue to feel as though I was sufficiently involved in day-to-day operations, because that's my passion. In addition, what structural systems alterations would I then have to make within the
organization?

SPNM helped me to think about this challenge, through interactions with faculty, my living group of eight participants, and larger case discussions in the classroom. In every discussion, I deeply appreciated the range of backgrounds and perspectives, which underscores how varied leadership is. We as leaders bring our individual passions; personality characteristics; and past experiences in life, in organizations, and in leadership to our assessment of a particular challenge and our creation of a strategy to respond to it.

I enjoyed the small group discussions, because of the caliber of the people who were in my group-the review of the cases was an opportunity to explore, in a more intimate setting, questions, reactions, thoughts, and possibilities that I had not thought of when I had read the cases on my own. Our group has remained in touch, and several of us have asked for advice on particular strategic challenges via e-mail. The relationships can be strong and enduring and of great personal and institutional value to the participants in the program.

My "aha" moment of direct relevance to my organization and to my leadership had to do with the forced and unreasonable choice between autonomy and affiliation in multisite organizations, and that both are needed. I continue to use that as a lens through which I reflect on a decision, a communication, or an examination of where the incentives lie for certain outcomes.

We are an organization that is constantly striving to be better today than we were yesterday, and to create plans today for our continued improvement tomorrow. SPNM was an opportunity for me to engage in meaningful, substantive, potentially transforming conversations, and to develop new relationships across sectors, and across the country and the world.