A question about compensation for Jewish nonprofit CEOs leapt out to me from an eye-catching, stop-the-scroll Instagram post on JTA’s feed last week.
“When did $650,000 become a reasonable Jewish nonprofit salary?” This is the question nonprofit consultant Arnie Draiman posed in his recent op-ed.
Draiman argues that $200,000-300,000 is “fair compensation,” while $650k and above is “excessive,” and asks, “Why does this particular job require that level of compensation?”
I’d like to answer these questions by posing a few of my own.
Why is it assumed fair that nonprofit workers, be they CEOs or rank-and-file employees, should be automatically paid less than their for-profit counterparts? This is a common unchallenged assumption across the nonprofit sector as a whole.
The work of the nonprofit is the charity. The salaries of the people who work there should not also be expected to be charity. They’re already giving their skills and time on behalf of the greater good; on top of that, they should be expected to live with a perpetual pay cut for the privilege of doing so?
We want people to devote themselves to our most important causes, but we also want them to actively limit their ceiling of financial success as the cost of doing so. How does this stance attract the best people, who could easily make more elsewhere, doing far less collectively beneficial work? How does this viewpoint align with our stated priorities of doing critical work we believe in, while we disincentivize candidates by offering them as little as possible in compensation to do that work? Why should the reward for being a devoted participant in Jewish service be settling for a lifelong limitation on the kind of lifestyle you want to provide for yourself and your family?
Meanwhile, those of us in the for-profit world by design seek the best financial opportunities at revenue-focused occupations, yet demand that others, who do the work we ourselves are unwilling to do because of the financial constraints, settle for less and stay permanently locked in a level of economic opportunity below our own.
Draiman also argues that “Jewish leadership has traditionally been associated with service and responsibility, not personal enrichment.” Why must these things be mutually exclusive? That they are not inherently aligned should be seen as a bug, not a feature.
With the new normal of our post-Oct. 7 world, Jewish communal institutions need to be more forward-thinking, risk-taking, and innovative than at any time in the last 50 years. In all aspects — in programming, in messaging, in personnel – our institutions need to understand that the real competition is not between one Jewish organization and the next, but that we are competing with every other opportunity the wider world has to offer. Imagine the talent pool we could access if Jewish nonprofit service could compete with corporate opportunity.
Why is aligning a desire to serve and a desire to achieve financially a bad thing? Why would we actively work to misalign these incentives?
Throwing out a random salary number with no budget attached is a strawman argument. How can we consider the fairness of the slice if we don’t even know the size of the pie?
Take, for instance, the Anti-Defamation League. The salary of CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is among the highest in the Jewish nonprofit world at $1.4 million. But the total revenue of the organization is $135 million, meaning the CEO’s salary is about 1% of overall revenue. Is that really “excessive”?
Additionally, we know the cost of living has risen across the board – even at an arbitrary number, what may have been reasonable at one time can no longer be taken for granted as reasonable now, not without considering the reality of our world’s current financial situation.
Let us also look at what the role of the CEO actually is. These individuals are the faces of these organizations, called upon to be leaders and operators of the highest caliber both internally with their hundreds of employees and externally – with donors, with the Jewish community in need of their services, and with a world that’s not exactly on the friendliest of terms with our little tribe.
CEOs work 24/7, find themselves on hundreds of planes back and forth all over the world at all hours, away from their lives and families, and bear the complete responsibility for the direction, operation, and public perception of the organization. When there’s hate or threats of violence, it’s on them, and their families, to bear. When there’s a crisis or a mistake, it’s their head on the chopping block. They’re on the front lines of some of our biggest and most important work … and the complaint is that they are too valued?
Furthermore, the overlap between people who want such jobs and people qualified to do them well is small. Finding willing leaders is rare, good ones even more so. If a CEO isn’t earning their salary, that’s one thing. Fire the CEO. But if they’re good at their jobs, they are the lynchpin in enabling the organization to do its work well, and bringing in the funding necessary for continuing that work into the future – and that deserves to be rewarded to the best of our ability.
In a time when we need more excellent people doing excellent work on behalf of the Jewish community than ever before, complaining that the jobs are too attractive is a misguided approach. If the issue is that employees outside the C-suite should receive better compensation (and as stated at the top, they absolutely should), let’s (please!) have that conversation. If the issue is that institutions are mismanaging their funds on ill-advised programs and inefficiencies, let’s discuss that too.
But at a time when we as a Jewish community have tens of thousands of fires to put out all over the world in every conceivable lane, to spend our energy complaining that our own leadership is being too well compensated for their herculean efforts on our behalf feels, well … excessive.
--
The post Nonprofit CEOs deserve fair compensation appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.