Building Your Personal Board: Why Nonprofit Leaders Need a Circle of Advisors
Being the leader of a nonprofit can be incredibly rewarding. It can also be incredibly lonely.
As an executive director or nonprofit leader, you are often expected to have the answers, support your staff, guide your board, manage relationships, raise money, make difficult decisions, and keep the organization moving forward.
But who is supporting you?
That is the question Allison Wyatt explores in her conversation with me on The Influential Nonprofit. And her answer is something every nonprofit leader should consider: build your own personal board of advisors.
Not your organization's board of directors.
Not your executive team.
Not even your staff.
A personal board is a circle of people intentionally chosen to support your growth, leadership, and development.
What Is a Personal Board of Advisors?
A personal board of advisors is essentially your own circle of champions.
These are people who believe in your potential, bring different types of expertise and perspective, and can support you as you navigate the challenges of leadership.
As Allison explains, nonprofit leaders wear a lot of hats. The problem is that you may not have experience with every hat you are expected to wear.
You might be an excellent fundraiser but have little experience with HR. You might be a visionary leader but struggle with accountability. You might know your mission inside and out but have never built a new business model or developed a product.
You don't have to know everything.
You need to know who can help you fill the gaps.
"Your personal board is really helping you get everything you need from a leadership development and career growth standpoint so that you can be the best leader that you can be."
And importantly, this board isn't primarily about what the organization needs.
It's about what you need.
Why Nonprofit Leaders Need Their Own Support System
One of the biggest challenges of nonprofit leadership is that there isn't always someone above you who can help you figure things out.
An executive director may not have another leader sitting in the office next door who has already navigated the exact problem they're facing.
And when you're the person everyone else comes to for answers, it can be difficult to admit that you don't have one.
That's where a personal board can make a significant difference.
Instead of trying to figure everything out yourself, you have people you can turn to intentionally:
Who can help me think through this?
Who has experience with something similar?
Who can introduce me to someone I need to know?
Who will tell me the truth?
Who can help me stay accountable?
Who can help me see something I can't see on my own?
The goal isn't to create another formal responsibility.
It's to make sure you're not carrying leadership alone.
Your Personal and Professional Life Are More Connected Than You Think
One of the interesting points in the conversation is the distinction between personal and professional support.
We often talk about these as two separate worlds.
But leadership doesn't really work that way.
How you show up at work is connected to how you show up everywhere else. Your relationships, confidence, stress, boundaries, decision-making, and personal experiences all influence the way you lead.
That means your personal board doesn't have to be exclusively about professional development.
You are the whole person.
And supporting the whole person can ultimately make you a stronger leader.
The Key Roles to Include on Your Personal Board
Your personal board doesn't need to consist of a specific number of people. It also doesn't mean that every person needs to meet with you regularly.
Instead, think about the different roles you need filled.
You may already have people in your life who naturally play some of these roles. The exercise is simply to become more intentional about recognizing them and asking for the kind of support you need.
1. A Sponsor Who Can Open Doors
A sponsor is someone who has relationships, credibility, or influence that can help you access opportunities.
They might introduce you to a potential funder, partner, collaborator, or other important connection.
The difference is that a sponsor isn't simply giving you advice.
They are willing to put some of their own credibility behind you.
Think about the doors you're trying to open.
Who already has the relationships or influence that could help you get there?
2. A Coach Who Helps You Move Forward
A coach helps you identify your goals and priorities and then stay accountable to them.
This can be particularly valuable for nonprofit leaders because it's incredibly easy to put everyone else's priorities ahead of your own.
Your staff needs something.
Your board needs something.
Your donors need something.
Your community needs something.
And suddenly your own goals have disappeared from the list.
A coach creates space to ask:
What do I actually want to accomplish, and what is getting in my way?
They can also help you stay accountable to the commitments you make to yourself.
3. A Mentor Who Has Been There Before
A mentor brings experience.
They have worn a hat you're currently wearing and learned something from doing it.
That experience can help you avoid unnecessary trial and error.
Allison gives the example of deciding to turn a consulting service into a product—something she had never done before. Instead of trying to figure everything out alone, she reached out to mentors who had already gone through the process.
Sometimes you don't need someone to solve the problem for you.
You just need someone who can say:
"I've been here before. Here's what I learned."
4. A Truth Teller Who Will Give You Honest Feedback
This might be one of the most important—and hardest—roles to find.
You need someone who isn't afraid to tell you the truth.
Not someone who simply affirms everything you do.
Someone who can say, "I'm not sure that's the right move," when you need to hear it.
Leadership can make honest feedback harder to find because people may be reluctant to challenge the person at the top.
That's why having someone outside the organizational hierarchy who can provide candid, constructive feedback can be incredibly valuable.
And there's a bigger lesson here for nonprofit leaders, too.
The goal shouldn't be to create an organization where leaders are the only people who can receive honest feedback.
The goal should be to create a culture where people feel safe enough to tell the truth.
What Happens When Feedback Isn't Safe?
Allison and Maryanne also discuss something that happens in many organizations: everyone is "nice" in the meeting, and then people go into the hallway and say what they really think.
That doesn't create psychological safety.
It creates avoidance.
When people don't receive feedback, they don't necessarily know there's a problem.
Allison shares an example of an employee who had been struggling for years. The organization knew there was an issue, but nobody had actually told the employee.
How can someone change something they don't know needs to change?
A useful comparison comes from sports.
A pitching coach doesn't wait until the end of the baseball season to tell a player everything they have been doing wrong. They provide small adjustments along the way. They also tell the player when they're doing something right so they know what to repeat.
The same principle applies to nonprofit leadership.
Feedback shouldn't be something that arrives as a surprise during an annual performance review.
It should be part of the ongoing relationship.
Leaders Need to Model Growth, Too
There is another important connection between personal development and organizational culture.
If you expect your staff to stretch, learn, take risks, and grow, you need to be willing to do the same.
Good leaders go first.
That doesn't mean pretending you have everything figured out.
In fact, modeling what it looks like to learn can make it safer for your team to do the same.
You can say:
Here's what I tried.
Here's what happened.
Here's what I learned.
Here's what I'm going to do differently next time.
Learning doesn't always look polished.
Sometimes it looks like falling off the bike.
But that's part of the process.
When leaders make room for their own growth, they send a powerful message to everyone else: you don't have to be perfect to learn.
Your Personal Board Doesn't Have to Meet Like a Real Board
One of the best things about this concept is that your personal board doesn't need to operate like an organizational board of directors.
Different people can have different levels of involvement.
A coach might meet with you regularly because you're working toward specific goals.
A mentor might be someone you call when you're facing a challenge in their area of expertise.
A sponsor might become involved when there's a particular relationship or opportunity you want to pursue.
A connector might help you find someone who knows something you need to know.
The important thing is intentionality.
You're not trying to make one person responsible for everything.
You're building a network of people who can support different parts of your leadership journey.
Don't Wait Until You Need Someone to Build Your Board
One of the strongest ideas from this conversation is that your personal board is most valuable before the crisis happens.
If you wait until you desperately need an introduction, a mentor, a sounding board, or expert advice, you're already operating reactively.
Instead, start building those relationships now.
Think about a challenge you've never faced before.
Maybe you're considering a new revenue stream. Maybe you're navigating a difficult HR situation. Maybe you're preparing for a major leadership transition.
Who do you know who has done something similar?
Who could help you think?
Who could connect you to someone else?
You want to be able to open your metaphorical Rolodex and know exactly who to call.
Stop Trying to Figure Everything Out Yourself
There is a powerful emotional benefit to having a personal board, too.
You don't just gain access to expertise.
You stop feeling so alone.
Nonprofit leaders can easily fall into the belief that they should be able to figure everything out themselves.
If they can't, they may assume something is wrong with them.
But asking for help isn't a leadership failure.
It's a leadership strategy.
You don't have to carry every problem simply because you're the leader.
Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is recognize what you don't know and intentionally bring someone else into the conversation.
Build a Personal Board That Reflects What You Need
Start by thinking about the areas where you most need support.
Where are you currently growing?
Where are you stuck?
What decisions are you facing?
What expertise are you missing?
Where do you need more honest feedback?
Where could a connection open an important door?
And perhaps most importantly:
Who can help you become the leader you want to be?
You may discover that some of these people already exist in your life.
The next step may simply be naming the relationship.
Instead of occasionally calling someone for advice, you might ask:
"Would you be willing to be someone I can reach out to when I need your expertise?"
What a gift that can be—not only to you, but to the person you're asking.
People generally like knowing that their experience matters.
And being intentional about the role someone plays can also prevent you from relying too heavily on one person for everything.
Final Thoughts: Leadership Doesn't Have to Be Lonely
Nonprofit leadership is a big job.
You don't need to know everything. You don't need to have every answer. And you certainly don't need to figure everything out alone.
A personal board of advisors gives you a structure for gathering the people who can help you grow, challenge you, connect you, encourage you, and tell you the truth.
Your organization's board exists to serve the organization.
Your personal board exists to support you.
And when you are better supported, more self-aware, more willing to grow, and less isolated, you have more capacity to lead the organization and the people counting on you.
So ask yourself:
Who is on your personal board?
And if you can't answer that yet, perhaps that's the next relationship-building project worth starting.
Ready to Build Your Personal Board?
Start by identifying the roles you need most—sponsor, coach, mentor, truth teller, connector, or collaborator—and think about who in your existing network could fill each one.
You don't need to build the entire board overnight.
Start with one person.
Then another.
The goal isn't to create more people to manage.
It's to create a circle of people you can trust when leadership gets complicated.