Purpose
Identify the specific leadership competencies a nonprofit leadership team is missing or thin on relative to what its strategic priorities actually require — and rank those gaps by how badly they threaten strategy execution. Turns a vague sense that "we may not have the right team for where we're going" into a prioritized, severity-rated gap list that a CEO or CPO can act on with development plans, hires, or restructuring.
When to Use
Invoke this skill when the user asks to:
- Assess whether the current leadership team can execute a newly adopted strategic plan
- Prepare a leadership capability review ahead of a board or leadership offsite
- Diagnose why strategy execution is stalling despite adequate funding
- Build the case for a senior hire, promotion, or interim leadership role
- Inform succession planning by exposing single-person dependencies and thin competencies
- Prioritize a leadership development budget against the highest-stakes gaps
Inputs Required
Before starting, collect:
- Strategic priorities: The organization's 3–6 stated strategic goals for the planning horizon (with timeframe if available)
- Current leadership team: Roles/titles on the leadership team and a description of each person's demonstrated strengths and known limitations
- Recent execution history: What has gone well and what has stalled or failed in the past 12–24 months
- Organizational scale/context: Budget size, headcount, funding model (grant/donor/earned/mixed), and life stage (startup, scaling, turnaround, mature)
- Anticipated changes: Planned growth, mergers, new program lines, funding shifts, or geographic expansion
- Constraints: Hiring budget, tenure/retention realities, board expectations, and any roles that cannot change
- Timeframe pressure: How soon each strategic priority must show progress
If demonstrated strengths per leader are described only in general terms, infer competency evidence from execution history and flag any assessment made on thin evidence.
Instructions
Step 1: Translate Strategy into Required Leadership Competencies
For each strategic priority, derive the leadership capabilities its execution demands. Do not assess people yet — first define what the strategy requires.
Work each priority through these lenses:
- Functional capability: The domain expertise the priority needs (e.g., earned-revenue design, government-contract management, advocacy, digital transformation)
- Directional capability: The change type involved — scaling, turnaround, innovation, consolidation, or steady-state stewardship — each demands different leadership behaviors
- Relational capability: The stakeholder complexity — funders, board, coalition partners, government, community — and the influence skills required
- Organizational capability: What the priority demands of internal systems — talent building, culture change, operational discipline, financial rigor
Produce a Required Competency Set: 8–14 named competencies, each tagged to the priority/priorities that generate it.
Step 2: Map Current Team Against Required Competencies
Build a competency-by-leader map. For each required competency, assess the team's coverage:
- Owned: A leader clearly demonstrates it with evidence
- Partial: Present but underdeveloped, unproven at required scale, or split across people without clear ownership
- Absent: No one on the team demonstrably holds it
- Concentrated: Held by exactly one person — a single point of failure
Cite the evidence (or its absence) from execution history for each rating. Flag competencies where the assessment rests on assumption rather than demonstrated behavior.
Step 3: Identify and Rate the Gaps
A gap exists wherever a required competency is Partial, Absent, or dangerously Concentrated. Rate each gap on two axes:
Severity (impact on strategy execution):
- Critical: A strategic priority cannot be executed without closing this gap
- High: The priority proceeds but with meaningful risk of stall, cost overrun, or reputational damage
- Moderate: Execution is slower or less effective but not blocked
- Watch: Not urgent now but will become critical as the priority scales
Urgency (how soon it bites): tied to the timeframe pressure of the priorities it affects — Immediate / This year / Next 12–24 months.
Combine into a single ranking. When ranking, weight gaps that block multiple priorities and gaps that are both Critical and Immediate to the top.
Step 4: Recommend a Closure Path for Each Gap
For each of the top gaps, specify the realistic route to close it, choosing among:
- Develop: Coach/train an existing leader — viable only when the foundation exists and the timeframe allows
- Redistribute: Shift the responsibility to a leader who already holds the competency (addresses Concentrated risk and misallocation)
- Hire: Bring in the capability — required when Absent and the timeframe is short
- Interim/fractional: Contract expertise for a bounded need or bridge
- Board/advisory: Fill a relational or governance gap through the board rather than staff
Note the constraint each recommendation runs into (budget, tenure, board dynamics) and the tradeoff.
Step 5: Surface Structural Risks
Beyond individual gaps, name any patterns:
- Over-concentration on one leader (key-person risk)
- A whole competency category missing across the team
- Mismatch between the team's dominant style (e.g., stewardship) and what strategy now requires (e.g., turnaround)
- Gaps that also expose a succession vulnerability
Output Format
- Structure: Required Competency Set → competency coverage map → prioritized gap list → closure recommendations → structural risks
- Length: 900–1,300 words
- Format: Coverage map as a table (competency | required by | current coverage | rating); prioritized gaps as a ranked, numbered list with severity/urgency labels; closure recommendations as structured bullets
- Sections: Required Competencies (mapped to priorities) → Current Coverage Map → Prioritized Gap List with Severity Ratings → Closure Recommendations → Structural Risks
- Tone: Chief People Officer advising a CEO — candid, evidence-grounded, unafraid to name a leader's limitation without disparaging the person
Quality Checklist
Before delivering output, verify:
- [ ] Every required competency is explicitly tagged to the strategic priority that generates it
- [ ] Each competency in the coverage map has one of the four ratings (Owned / Partial / Absent / Concentrated) with cited evidence
- [ ] Every gap carries both a severity rating and an urgency label — no unrated gaps
- [ ] The gap list is ranked, and multi-priority and Critical+Immediate gaps sit at the top
- [ ] Each top gap has a specific closure path (Develop / Redistribute / Hire / Interim / Board) with its constraint named
- [ ] Assessments based on thin or assumed evidence are explicitly flagged rather than stated as fact
Notes
- Resist rating everything "Critical" — a gap list where half the items are critical is not prioritized. Force distinction.
- The most consequential nonprofit gap is often a style mismatch, not a missing skill: a stewardship-oriented team asked to run a turnaround. Watch for this in Step 5.
- Concentrated competencies (one person holds a critical capability) are simultaneously a gap and a succession risk — flag both dimensions.
- When execution history conflicts with a leader's stated strengths, trust the execution history and say so.
- If strategic priorities are vague, ask one clarifying question before proceeding: "What must be measurably true in 18 months for this priority to count as executed?"
How to use this skill
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