Nick Grono
Nick Grono is the CEO of the Freedom Fund, a nonprofit working to reduce and eventually eliminate modern slavery throughout the world—one which has already positively impacted well over a million people. After exploring policy change through government work, Grono left behind his law career and worked at the International Crisis Group before eventually joining the Freedom Fund as CEO. In addition to his personal work in the nonprofit sector, Grono is focused on helping other nonprofit leaders grow in efficiency and impact, a mission he hopes to achieve through his forthcoming book How to Lead Nonprofits: Turning Purpose into Impact to Change the World. In this interview, he talks about the differences between for-profit and nonprofit businesses, how to scale a nonprofit, how to maintain mental health when working with such heavy topics, and above all, how to make an impact in the world through business.
What qualities do you think the most successful nonprofit leaders have?
I think they need to have a clear vision for the change they want to help bring about. Nonprofits are all about driving positive change, so you need to clearly understand what it is you're seeking to achieve. You also need a focus on achieving measurable impact. If you want to bring about change, then you need to be able to measure it so you can assess your organization’s performance. Finally, a commitment to building an inclusive culture that is focused on the community that your nonprofits serve.
Do you believe these qualities are common among younger generations? If not, how would you suggest we go about learning them?
I think younger generations are very attuned to the importance of purpose in their life, and nonprofits are all about purpose and positive change, and building a strong culture. I actually think that the business world has a lot to learn from the nonprofit world when it comes to issues around purpose and culture.
What inspired you to get into the nonprofit sector and, more specifically, focus on the issue of modern day slavery? Have those reasons shifted over time?
I started my career as a commercial lawyer. I worked at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, for a couple of years, and I worked for the Australian Government. It was there that I got really interested in policy change - trying to change rules, regulations, and situations to improve outcomes for citizens. I left government and went and studied in the U.S. for a year [at Princeton] and then went to work for a wonderful nonprofit called the International Crisis Group, which worked on conflicts around the world trying to help policymakers, politicians, government leaders, and ministers make better decisions and achieve better outcomes. I found that fascinating and rewarding. It also exposed me firsthand to the issue of slavery when I went out to Northern Uganda and saw boys and girls who had been enslaved by a rebel group, The Lord's Resistance Army. A few years later, I was approached to head up a new anti-slavery foundation, and given my experience and the opportunity, I was very keen to make that move. That's how I ended up in the anti-slavery world. The reasons haven't changed over time. I believe my organization can make a huge difference in combating modern slavery and find that tremendously rewarding.
What is one piece of advice you would give to your younger self, and how would you adapt it if you were starting your journey now instead?
My answer is very much predicated on my own circumstances, and everyone's circumstances are different. I have a very strong view that the career you think you might have in 20 years’ time is probably going to be very different from the one you end up having. In my case, I thought I'd be a lawyer and in fact, I moved progressively away from the practice of law and banking, to government, and then nonprofits. I think the world is becoming ever more flexible and adaptable and changeable, so you have to pursue a career path and take opportunities and risks, because you won't be doing the same thing for 20, 30, or 40 years.
In a world with so many critical issues to solve, does it ever feel like you aren’t going anywhere? How do you reassure yourself that you are making an impact, and how do you measure that impact?
Again, that’s a really big question. It depends so much on how you look at it. We work on modern slavery where people are enslaved, forced to work, forced into sex - a crime that impacts on 50 million people who are in slavery today. I know we have a huge impact on communities where we work. Working with our partners, we have directly liberated more than 30,000 people from slavery. That has an unimaginable impact on their lives, on their families, on their communities. We have helped over 200,000 kids that were at risk of slavery, or in slavery, get back into school. We have directly impacted on 1.5 million lives. All of those are very real changes. But we're also trying to tackle slavery globally, and slavery has gone up over the last decade rather than gone down. It's a continuing struggle. I focus on what we can directly achieve, but also on making sure we get better and better at what we do and influencing others.
Adding on to that, how does a successful nonprofit scale its impact on the community? What resources, strategies, or partnerships are most crucial to making a difference?
Scale is really difficult for nonprofits. It's very different from business. If you're a successful business, and you've got a really powerful model, chances are you will grow, raise more income, reduce your margins and become ever more successful - the flywheel effect as the business author, Jim Collins talks about it. For nonprofits, we have to get people to give us money. As we get bigger, there's a risk that people move on. They often say, “well, you're doing really well now, so we'll direct our funding elsewhere to someone else who needs it,” which is the opposite of business. As a nonprofit it becomes more expensive to raise money as you get bigger, because the costs of raising money grow. For nonprofits to scale, I think they really need to do two things: first is to collaborate; they need to persuade other organizations and actors to align with their cause. If we can build a movement or a coalition, we can have much greater impact than by acting on our own. Secondly, we need to change systems. If we can change laws, norms and behaviors, we will have a much greater impact than just by seeking to have a direct impact on a small number of people. The key to scale for nonprofits is around collaboration and systems change.
Between funding, connections, and a disparity of opportunities in general, it can often feel like entrepreneurship is a rich person’s game. How can someone without such advantages bridge the gap in order to become successful and make a difference?
In a nonprofit world, those considerations often apply. Often, there really are advantages to having a wealthy, well connected background; you get the internships, you get the opportunities to do jobs, for very little pay, whereas people that don't have your resources have to earn an income. Having said that, I think there are much greater opportunities in many ways in the nonprofit world because you're focused on change. You're focused on serving vulnerable, marginalized communities, there is a much greater trend in the nonprofit space to recognize and support the leadership of those who we are seeking to serve, the people who are directly impacted from climate change or from slavery, those from the countries in which we are trying to support change - Africa or Asia or elsewhere - or those that are more vulnerable. There is still a long way to go, but I suspect there is more egalitarianism in the nonprofit world than in the business world.
Despite the so-called overnight successes, few entrepreneurs can ‘make it’ without long days and a somewhat unsustainable pace. What strategies do you use to minimize stress and avoid burnout?
In a nonprofit world, I suspect there are many of the same stresses as in business, but also different stresses, like trying to build an organization, persuade people to give you funding, often surviving on minimal funding, and working on very, very difficult issues, meeting people who have been subjected to the most unimaginable abuses, working on conflict, working on climate change, and seeing the devastation that has been wrought on the world. The stresses relate both to the kind of organization itself and to the issues you're working on. When it comes to the organization itself, I suspect responses must be much the same for business or nonprofit, like trying to build a work life balance, which can often sound a bit trite when you're working on these difficult issues; trying to get started up; trying to build an effective team around you so you have proper, genuine support. In my case, trying and not always succeeding, to develop good habits, like meditation, regular exercise, getting a good amount of sleep. It is often easier said than done. I think having a supportive environment and being willing to seek external advice. I’ve seen a psychologist when I just felt the need to be able to unburden myself to an outside expert. I think the world is becoming a lot more aware of mental health challenges and supportive of efforts to address them, which is a good thing.
Also on the topic of mental health, it is very easy to become stressed about current events, and nonprofits and other activism-focused organizations are closer to those issues than most. Does it seem more or less hopeful from the perspective of someone who is involved?
I've been working in a nonprofit space for 20 years, and I've been working generally for almost just over 30 years. To be honest, it's the most depressing time of all of those decades that I've ever experienced, with increasing conflict with climate change, refugee flows, polarization in politics. It really is a pretty difficult time. I try to take comfort out of the fact that we can make a very direct and positive impact on individual lives, and take sustenance out of that. But it can be challenging, so one has to be aware of it and be deliberate about your responses and supporting yourself and those around you. I have a big focus on supporting my team who are often struggling with these issues.
Leading a business, like any large project, can seem overwhelming at first, and requires you to break it down into smaller steps. Where do you start, and what parts do people most often forget about?
I'm a big believer in breaking things down to small steps. We're working on the issue of slavery; 50 million people in the world in slavery. We can't solve all of that, but we can have a very direct impact on tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of lives. We start at a community level. We can make a difference in that community and we can drive change upwards, then that community becomes advocates for change and starts lobbying at the state level or at the national level. We try to change systems, but we always keep a very, very direct focus on the community that we are trying to support. I've always been moved by a parable, which you may have heard, that one of our founders used to tell me. It is about a little boy and an old man walking down a beach after a massive storm which has thrown tens of thousands of starfish onto the beach where they're going to die unless they get thrown back into the water. And that little boy starts throwing one starfish after the other into the ocean. And the old man says, “Why are you doing that? You can't save all of the starfish. It's not going to make a difference to all of them. There are tens of thousands.” And the little boy picks up another starfish and throws it into the ocean and says “This will make a difference for this one starfish.” And I often think that it's really important to focus on the lives that we can directly impact, understanding that over time, all of those lives will impact on many other people’s lives and drive much bigger change.
How is running a nonprofit different from a for profit, and what lessons apply to each?
It's a great question. Contrary to the received wisdom, there are some significant differences. There are lots of similarities. There are well run businesses and badly run businesses. That are well run nonprofits and badly run nonprofits. Leadership requires discipline, a clear focus and a clear vision, and the same for nonprofits. But the big differences are around impact, stakeholders and power. In terms of impact, for business, it's pretty clear to understand what you're trying to achieve. You're trying to maximize your financial returns. You may want to do good as a secondary purpose, but your primary objective is strong financial returns, and that can be measured, and you can compare the performance of one business against another. Whereas for nonprofits, it's not about profit, it's about driving change. But that can be very difficult to measure. How do you measure whether you're having an impact on climate change? Or on hunger? And even harder, how do you compare one organization working on an issue to another? Imagine you're two climate change organizations, and one is lobbying governments to change their laws and another is engaged in reforestation. How do you compare the performance of those two organizations? Which one is more successful or impactful? It's a very, very different challenge than that of business. The second issue is stakeholders. For businesses whose primary focus is on financial returns, their primary stakeholders are their shareholders. There are other stakeholders, but shareholders generally come first. Whereas for nonprofits, you have a whole range of stakeholders: the community you serve, your staff, funders, board members, and members of the public, and all of them have quite a degree of influence over what you do. It's much more complex to manage your stakeholders often than it is for business. Finally, power. Power is often more diffuse in nonprofits than it is in businesses. Businesses are often run in a much more hierarchical way. Think of Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan or any high profile business leader; they usually have a lot more executive authority. Whereas for nonprofits, because you have all of these stakeholder groups and multiple competing agendas, you have to act more like a parliamentarian. You have to be persuasive and you have to build coalitions to achieve impact. So there are some very notable differences.
You have a new book coming out. What is it about and what are the main takeaways?
Available for preorder now! https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/750160/how-to-lead-nonprofits-by-nick-grono/
I have a book that will be published in July. It's called How to Lead Nonprofits: Turning Purpose into Impact to Change the World. The key takeaways are that the nonprofit leader should be acutely focused on the purpose of their organization, the change they want to see, and turning that into impact, making the world a better place. I break the book up into three broad sections around purpose, people and partners. Purpose is about your direction of travel. It's about your mission, your strategy, and your impact. People is about your internal team. It's about the CEO, first and foremost and about the staff team. I also look at diversity, equity, and inclusion, and at the board. The third part is around external partners. These are the communities that you serve, your funders, and your peer organizations and networks.
What drives you to do the work you do?
It's a belief that, working with my colleagues and partners, we can impact positively on millions of lives. I can't think of anything more rewarding. I never wake up wondering if what I do has purpose or impact or if what I do is a net positive. I often wonder if we're as effective as we can be, but that's very different than when I was a commercial lawyer, or when I was working at an investment bank. I often queried whether what I did made a positive difference, or whether it just helped shuffle money around between the different actors. So I think it's the psychic rewards that you get working for a nonprofit, and that is hugely valuable.
What is your greatest hope this year?
I always hope that my organization will have ever greater impact and influence and positively change even more lives. And then, of course, I have a book coming out, and the book is all about trying to help nonprofit leaders be more effective leaders, so that's my vision of scale. If I can help nonprofit leaders become ever more effective, and better at what they do, that can potentially impact millions, if not tens of millions of lives. So those are my hopes for the year.
