Do Lay Leaders Actually Lead?
Joshua Ladon and Jo-Ellen Pozner
Joshua Ladon is Vice President, West Coast, and Senior Faculty at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
Jo-Ellen Pozner is Associate Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business.
Credit: Shutterstock
Do lay leaders actually lead? We come to this question with both personal experience as lay leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish community and professional expertise: Jo-Ellen is an authority on corporate governance and Josh regularly consults with lay and professional leaders throughout the Jewish world. We spend a lot of time acting as lay leaders and thinking about the practice of lay leadership.
From our shared vantage point, the short answer to the question of whether lay leaders lead is, it depends. There are certainly organizations in which lay leaders are a bit of an afterthought or even an annoyance: donors who need to be flattered and appeased; board members who do little more than rubber stamp organizational decisions; fundraising gala chairs who want to blow the whole budget on balloons and branded swag.
While these tropes are familiar, we do not think they are necessarily normative or even reflective of the realities of contemporary Jewish life. Lay members can—and do—play critical functions in many Jewish organizations, supplementing the skills and capacities of professionals without breaking the bank and fortifying those organizations as they do so.
Whether or not lay leaders lead depends on whether they are set up to lead, which involves a complex calculus. The organization’s needs must be well-matched with lay leaders who are available and who have relevant skills and knowledge. Specifically, we believe that the relative effectiveness of lay leaders is a function of the relationship among three critical aspects of the local context: the scope and mission of the organization in question; the characteristics of the community in which the organization is embedded; and the skills, resources, and interests of the lay leaders themselves. We discuss different models for each of these below before outlining five common ways these elements work together. We hope to show that when both the structure and needs of an organization match what members of the community can offer, lay leaders can make a true contribution.
What Is Lay Leadership?
Most contemporary scholars understand leadership in general as a set of behaviors through which actors “influence and facilitate individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives” (Yukl, 2006:66). In simple terms, those who enact leadership are the folks who help get things done.
Laypeople may take on a range of leadership activities. Getting things done is not the exclusive provenance of managers or executives or boards of directors, nor is it bounded by the work of rabbis or development directors or Hebrew school teachers or community organizers or museum curators or soup kitchen supervisors. Lay leaders are therefore best understood as unpaid stakeholders who take on a gamut of organizational responsibilities from the fiduciary duties of boards, which are legally required of all registered nonprofits, to advisory roles, fundraising, teaching, liturgical leadership, and the like. Getting things done does not require formal authority but it does suggest the assumption of responsibility and accountability, an important distinction between lay leaders and volunteers.
Research suggests that lay leaders tend to be particularly committed to the act of leadership, often exhibiting more leadership behaviors than professionals within the same organization. In a 2015 study, Barry Posner finds that lay leaders are often more committed and less likely to have a transactional relationship with their organizations than their paid counterparts. Based on these insights, we are confident not only that laypeople can enact leadership but also that their contributions can be vital to the success and efficacy of the organizations in which they work. We have seen it in our own lived experience.
These expansive definitions of what leadership is and what forms it might take encompass the full spectrum of possibilities. Here, we will dig into illustrative examples that bring possible concatenations of organizations, communities, and lay leadership into sharper focus.
Forms of Jewish Communal Life
How can we use the same vocabulary to speak about the lay leadership of an urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area; an organization training medical aid workers in Cape Town, South Africa; a home for Jewish adults with special needs in Toronto; and a yeshiva in Buenos Aires, Argentina? Around the world, Jews have mirrored the broader societies in which they live by creating a huge array of communal, nonprofit organizations. In North America, the scope of Jewish nonprofit organizations mirrors the scope of nonprofit organizations more broadly in terms of mission, size, budget, age, complexity, donor base, and so on.
For our purposes, we will divide the universe of Jewish communal organizations into four broad categories:
Production of Jewish Life: This category includes organizations enabling and supporting the activities of communal Jewish life. This support often, but not always, includes providing a place for Jews (and Jewish-adjacent friends) to engage with other Jews and enact Judaism, defined expansively.This category includes what might seem like more “traditional” or “legacy” institutions like schools, camps, synagogues, museums, community centers, burial centers, eruv maintenance associations, and Hillel houses, as well as more recent additions like community farms, art and performance collaboratives, and taverns. This group also includes organizations that gather Jews together without having a fixed location; organizations that provide Jewish resources online so that participants can engage from home; and a plethora of national organizations and associations that connect and support such various institutions.
Jewish Social Services and Aid: These are organizations that focus on those in need in the Jewish community, within broader humanity, or both. Some have a narrower focus such as addressing domestic violence in the Jewish community, supporting cancer patients, or attending to food insecurity. In contrast, others, like a Jewish Family and Children’s Service, might focus on physical and mental health and well-being from prenatal care to end-of-life care and everything in between.
Communal Relations and Maintenance: These organizations focus on supporting the infrastructure of Jewish institutional life with an eye toward both the internal Jewish community and bridging relationships to non-Jewish communities. Some of these organizations are legacy institutions like a Jewish Community Relations Council or a Federation. This category also includes private philanthropic foundations, organizations for Jewish professionals, and emerging security-focused institutions.
Jewish Advocacy Groups: While some organizations in the previous categories might engage in some advocacy on behalf of the Jewish community, this category includes organizations specifically focused on advocating particular political positions. This work includes advocacy for Israel and extends to include Jewish organizations aligned with certain political parties and Jewish groups advocating for specific issues as Jews: Jewish environmental advocacy groups and Jewish reproductive rights groups are two examples among many.
The types of leadership, decisions, and support lay leaders will be asked to give to a school are different than the kinds demanded by a Jewish environmental advocacy organization. A summer camp will call upon its lay leaders in different ways than an organization focused on skill-building for Jewish communal professionals.
Some organizations are focused on a neighborhood, a city or metropolitan area, or a state, while others seek to have national or international impact, and this will also shape the type of lay leadership they need. For example, the lay leadership of a synagogue in which the bulk of the community lives within walking distance might require a more regular and demanding set of activities from its board than a global nonprofit focused on eradicating antisemitism. A synagogue might need its lay leaders to organize visits to the sick or to a shiva house. By contrast, a nonprofit fighting antisemitism might ask its lay leaders to introduce its professional leaders to potential donors and partners. The scope of the mission, the complexity of the organization’s activities, and its geographic reach will lead to different demands for its leaders.
Lay leaders who can identify the scope and the mission of their organization will be better equipped to understand what a meaningful contribution to that organization might entail.
Community Context
The effectiveness of lay leadership is also influenced by the characteristics of each respective local community. The demographics of community members, the skills they embody, their motivations and their ability to contribute their time and expertise: all of these play a role in determining whether lay leadership will emerge, whether it will be effective, and how much impact it will have.
Building on Hambrick, Misangyi, and Park’s 2015 study of effective corporate governance, we suggest that four community dimensions shape lay leadership: demographics, bandwidth, motivation, and specific expertise. Importantly, the community context intersects with, but is distinct from, the categories of organizations described above.
Demographics: A community’s demographic spread will affect both its needs and the number of its potential lay leaders. Communities with a balanced age distribution are likely to comprise a large group of people ready, willing, and able to serve as lay leaders. Communities with a disproportionate number of either young families or retirees, on the other hand, will have fewer available lay leaders, as these are typically the groups most in need of community services and with the least time and capacity for giving in return. Likewise, growing communities are often better positioned than communities in decline to find the right person to take on the right role in Jewish communal life. In this regard, the needs of the community and the human capital it possesses may be negatively correlated.
Bandwidth: Large communities with many capable individuals may be able to allocate responsibilities among these potential leaders more equitably and possibly more lightly, encouraging broader participation. In smaller communities or those in which most skills reside in just a handful of people, lay leaders may more easily burn out. Organizations in communities with many other Jewish communal organizations may find it harder to secure volunteers than those located in communities with just a few centers of Jewish life. Age distribution may also play a role here, as those with young children or aging parents and those embarking on new careers may find themselves short on time and energy, despite their skills. In short, the more people with broad bandwidth in a given community, the more likely any organization is to find somebody willing to step up.
Motivation: Lay leaders engage only when they feel driven to do so. Leadership takes time, energy, and effort, and often goes unrecognized; in fact, those who put themselves in visible positions within a community are likely to be on the receiving end of significant kvetching. (We appreciate the irony of b’nai Yisrael whining at Moses about their desire for meat in the wilderness in the Torah portion Beha'alotecha, which literally means “when you step up.”) Those who lead do so because they are called to, because they are intrinsically motivated to get involved, or because the work is its own reward. Social interaction—with other leaders or with other people in the community—can also be a powerful motivator. A community that has a history of recognizing lay leaders can draw in others by offering examples of what is expected of lay leadership, and some, of course, will be drawn in by the possibility of earning recognition.
Skills: Lay leaders must have skills that contribute meaningfully to core organizational functions. Every synagogue needs Torah readers, service leaders, and teachers; a shul with a dozen members capable of reading Torah, leading prayer services, or writing sermons can rely on these people to contribute to every Shabbat. When the membership lacks these skills, clergy must fill these roles. A Jewish day school whose parent community includes people with fundraising, legal, financial, or building management expertise is likely to have these folks involved in keeping the organization running; when community members do not have these skills, again, it falls to the professionals to manage those tasks. A Jewish Federation in a community with many other nonprofit organizations can rely on board members and volunteers to lead action-oriented committees effectively and to identify and bridge connections to important partners; in areas with fewer organizational peers, it is more likely that professionals will have to fill those roles.
These categorizations, though necessarily broad, are a good starting point for thinking about the community-level characteristics that determine the need for and availability of lay leaders. Next, we turn to what is perhaps the most critical question: what do lay leaders have to offer?
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What Do Lay Leaders Bring to the Table?
Great lay leaders see their organizations for what they are and what they can be. Laypeople can only lead if they possess the things that help organizations thrive. Conventional wisdom divides these capacities into three neat, though not entirely independent, buckets: wealth, wisdom, and work. These familiar categories remain relevant to organizational life and are critical to understanding what makes lay leadership work. Decades of observing volunteer communal life suggest that the most effective lay leaders typically bring two of these three capacities.
Wealth: The most obvious and often the most crucial thing lay leaders bring to the table is resources. They are often responsible for securing financial resources either through personal donations or fundraising, either independently or in conjunction with a development professional. The resources they help access need not be monetary, however: network connections to outside experts, donors, publicity, and venues are also forms of wealth in this context.
Wisdom: The most effective lay leaders have specific knowledge, experience, and perspective pertinent either to the organization’s mission or to the proper execution of fiduciary responsibilities and use those skills to guide the organization. Fiduciary duties involve issues like hiring, overseeing, and monitoring the performance of executives; setting the organization’s strategic direction; and monitoring or advising on financial performance and budget-setting with an eye toward long-term sustainability. Additional competencies, like running a meeting, negotiation experience, financial expertise, and strategic thinking are also relevant forms of wisdom. Human capital—personal expertise in valued professional services, like the CPA who takes on the role of organizational treasurer—is critical for organizations that lack deep expertise in the full range of organizational issues that for-profit corporations might be expected to have. Though skills often determine who will assume formal roles like board chair or treasurer, they do not solely determine who leads. The lived experience of seasoned, senior lay leaders allows those folks to provide critical wisdom through advisory roles, particularly as pertains to organizational mission and vision. Those who understand the communal landscape and organizational environment, who embody the organization’s values, and who have experience that might help guide the organization toward attaining its goals are invaluable contributors to lay leadership.
Work: Every community organization needs a group of lay leaders willing to get their hands dirty and help execute core organizational functions. This bucket is less about expertise than it is about elbow grease. In some organizations, this may involve serving as organizational ambassadors, committee organizers, community builders, and classroom parents, as is often the case in day schools. Leveraging professional expertise also falls into the work bucket: the involvement of lawyers, real estate professionals, builders and building managers, teachers, mental health professionals, and all of those experts whose training and day jobs match the work in which the organization is engaged can be a huge boon to any community group. In organizations involved in the production of Jewish life, for example, lay leaders may be extremely involved in reading Torah, leading prayer services, and teaching classes, leading museum tours, and checking and repairing the eruv.
Work is in some ways the most difficult to anticipate in selecting lay leaders. Some want to take on leadership roles merely for status or camaraderie; these folks rarely pitch in meaningfully or regularly and may thereby outstay their usefulness. Even those who are deeply committed and willing to roll up their sleeves may see only a small piece of the action confronted daily by board executives, for example, and therefore have unrealistic expectations of what sort of work is necessary. Some organizations then find themselves with a long roster of lay leaders, few of whom are of real service—and this may be okay, depending on how the rest of the puzzle fits together (more on this below).
If a community lacks the necessary human capital, never fear: it can be acquired on the job! Through our own involvement in Jewish communal life, we have gained a range of skills we never knew we might need. We have led searches for new professionals, consulted with specialists about pandemic-related facility modifications, led crisis communication efforts, sold commercial real estate, consulted with lawyers and constitutional scholars, activated director-and-officer insurance, negotiated with solar contractors, determined the right level of security presence, developed a policy to calculate the appropriate annual draw from the proceeds of an endowment, and much, much more. More than anything else, our experience suggests that effective lay leaders must be curious and open to learning.
Professional Partnership
Regardless of the particular combination of organization, community context, and lay leader skills, a final requirement for effective lay leadership is a willing partner on the professional team. Some organizations lack access to professional leadership— informal minyanim, startup organizations, and shuls in small communities are all good examples—and might rely almost exclusively on the efforts of lay leaders. Others can only be run by professionals because of the specific skills and regulatory compliance needs involved—think here of social service and aid providers—or are so deeply staffed that lay leadership is little more than a means of developing community engagement and potential donors—as is typical in communal relations and advocacy groups. Most organizations fall somewhere in between these two extremes, suggesting that they will benefit from the participation of lay leaders… when the professional leadership is open to their help.
It should come as no surprise that professionals and lay leaders sometimes experience friction and conflict. Lay leaders are typically responsible for hiring, firing, and evaluating professional staff, which can lead to resistance in both directions. Professional staff may see lay leaders as interfering with their work, or they may rely so heavily on lay leaders that the latter become resentful or simply burnt out. Conflict may be overt, centered on disagreements about strategic direction-setting, or incidental, due largely to communication gaps and asymmetric access to information; and sometimes it descends into the realm of the personal. Factors like generational differences and overlapping relationships within a community can also make things messy. Sometimes an issue as seemingly simple as the format of meetings can be the cause of major disagreements. All of these problems can be resolved through proactive communication, careful setting of expectations, and regular reviews of the performance of both professional and lay leadership.
A Few Models of Lay Leadership (Among Many)
That there needs to be a match between those characteristics of Jewish communal life and the lay leadership model adopted should not be surprising. Those who have experience with more than one Jewish communal institution will already recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all model. The different experiences of one lay leader with whom we spoke illustrated this point beautifully. Their first experience as a board president was with a young organization whose CEO was its founder and whose well-defined mission and scope focused narrowly on young Jews. In this role, their job was to support the CEO, rally the board around a shared vision, and help the organization move from one stage of growth to another.
By comparison, when they took on the board presidency of a large legacy community organization in a major metro area, they found it difficult to drive significant change. In this organization, lay leaders were tasked with keeping the organization moving in a particular direction but had no ability to influence its course. This lay leader brought the same skills to both roles, but each organization’s needs and goals delimited the ways in which they were expected and able to contribute and, thereby, their effectiveness.
We have already covered key elements that define the potential for lay leadership of any given organization, but this story highlights a final element we must consider, namely, that as organizations grow, their leadership structure also changes. Below, we outline five ways that an organization might structure its leadership as it develops from idea to institution. Nearly all will begin using the first or second model, grassroots and first generation, respectively, and some will stay there. Others will move smoothly from grassroots into the corporate model or shift from a communitarian to a complementary structure as they grow. Each model, however, can be mapped according to the characteristics we listed above, and recognizing where your organization fits into this scheme will give you further data for setting your lay leaders up to truly lead.
Grassroots self-organizing: Perhaps it begins with a post on social media, a text to some friends, or a gathering in someone’s living room. It might be instigated by a case of antisemitism in a local school, a schism in a synagogue, or a local city council decision. These sorts of Jewish organizations are exclusively lay led. Once they get off the ground, some choose to hire a professional. Others, like independent minyanim, are defined by their grassroots nature and will never have an executive director. These organizations need a lay leadership that is formal in governance structure (with a board, president, vice president, and so forth) and informal in that everyone involved pitches in in some way. This model requires motivated lay leaders with specific skills and significant bandwidth, and they can be found in communities of all sorts.
First-generation: Some Jewish organizations begin not out of a community need but with the vision and perseverance of a single person who quickly becomes the professional leader. These organizations might be small one- or two-person teams, or, like Moishe House, the Hadar Institute, or the Shefa School, quickly grow, become established, and multiply in scale. Oftentimes, organizations in their first generation rely on lay leaders in significant ways to gain legitimacy and resources as well as on-the-job training. When the founder is the CEO, lay leaders can provide significant coaching, technical advice, strategic support, and deep wisdom related to the types of serious challenges that emerge during early-stage growth. This model requires lay leaders with wisdom, deep networks and, often, significant wealth or access to other required resources—people most easily found in dynamic, growing communities.
Communitarian: Many Jewish organizations, especially synagogues, schools, and other community-centered projects that help enact Jewish life, rely on lay leaders well beyond their board of directors. In fact, in some synagogues—especially those with dynamic, charismatic rabbinic leadership—the board might be relatively weak even as the organization relies on large numbers of lay leaders able and willing to take on the bulk of activity outside the most basic functions of institutional leadership. This model is most common in locally focused organizations, smaller communities or those outside urban centers, and in smaller congregations and schools where the distinctions between board member, lay leader, and participant are purposefully blurred. This model requires lay leaders who are ready to work and who have the bandwidth and skills to do so.
Complementary: There is a wide range of Jewish organizations whose boards of directors and professionals, together with lay members, all act in concert to ensure the well-being and success of the organization. In this model, the nature of the work demands that the laity and the professional staff are both actively engaged, as in a larger school, a community relations council, or a Jewish farm. Both the professional and lay leadership must be aware of their capacities and comfortable with the roles each might take on. Beyond this, the specifics may vary. In one setting, the board might assume the work that the professional staff might do in another. Teaching a specialty class based on individual expertise, planning an annual gala, and soliciting major gifts are all examples of tasks that some schools will assign to professionals and others to lay leaders. This model requires a sense of equilibrium between lay and professional leaders. Wisdom and work are critical to this model, which can be found in communities of all sorts.
Corporate: These are the most professionalized of Jewish nonprofits and tend to be the largest, whether community relations and maintenance organizations, Jewish advocacy agencies, large synagogues, camps, schools, or museums. Here, lay leaders are guided by professional staff. Certain senior board members might play significant leadership roles, but most lay leaders lead in more subtle ways, as ambassadors, stewards, and connectors, helping to raise the profile and spread word of the organization and its message. This model is often seen in larger, more established communities and in communities of any size with significant financial resources.
Conclusion
Do lay leaders lead? When the needs of the organization, the local context, and the members of the community all align, lay leaders can be empowered to contribute meaningfully to Jewish communal life. At the same time, there is no one ideal model of lay leadership. Both needs and resources are always situational, and a model that is effective for a Jewish advocacy group in a major metropolitan area may not work well for a suburban social service provider or a rural Jewish life producer. Some organizations may only need lay leaders’ wealth, while others may not be able to survive without their work. Even more than okay, this is appropriate.
The good news is that the only thing necessary for effective lay leadership is the presence of capable, thoughtful, kind, committed volunteers and a group of engaged, cooperative, skilled professionals to partner with them. The bad news is that it is up to each organization and community to figure out what it needs beyond that. We hope these thoughts provide the starting point for a conversation about what sort of community you want to be, the most critical component of which involves setting expectations: what does this organization need, what kinds of lay leaders should we engage, and how can we do it more smoothly together?
Now, go and lead!
Works Cited
Hambrick, Donald C., Vilmos F. Misangyi, and Chuljin A. Park. "The quad model for identifying a corporate director’s potential for effective monitoring: Toward a new theory of board sufficiency." Academy of Management Review 40, no. 3 (2015): 323-344.
Posner, Barry Z. "An investigation into the leadership practices of volunteer leaders." Leadership & Organization Development Journal 36, no. 7 (2015): 885-898.
Yukl, Gary. Leadership in Organizations, 9/e. Pearson Education (India, 2006).
