Addressing a few root causes of Jewish institution failure

How shifts in consumer preferences have created actionable and necessary opportunities to reform pieces of how we operate

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Many Jewish institutions face the monumental challenge of adapting themselves to a rapid shift in the demographics of our community and the quickly changing preferences of their customers. From synagogues to day schools to JCCs and beyond, the ground has shifted rapidly in the past 30 years and it can be rightfully hard for the highest functioning institutions to adjust to those changes. In many ways the deeper the institution’s roots and history the harder the challenge becomes to confront the inertia that prevents productive change. The implication of not adapting appropriately is degraded membership, lack of financial sustainability, and overall lack of relevance in the lives of the people that institution formally served.

The question becomes how we adapt our strategies to more readily meet customer needs. Unfortunately that’s really hard to do. Perhaps there is merit in first diagnosing the actionable upstream challenges that exist that make it so hard. If we diagnose those challenges and propose building blocks to do something about them we can begin to grapple with the strategies and tactics necessary to make a difference.

Root Challenges

1. Gaps in dated leadership skill sets

The rapid proliferation of alternatives for people’s time and the quality of alternative experiences has raised the bar on how institutional leaders need to think about the experiences they offer. Synagogues provide an instructive example. When I was growing up in the 90s the synagogue I attended had a virtual monopoly on my family’s time on a Saturday morning. We lived in Natick, a suburb of Boston, in a world without the internet and with a fraction of the offline alternatives available today. Going to synagogue was a relatively easy choice to make on a Saturday morning. 

If you were a Rabbi or a congregational leader in that era of shrunken choice the question was not how do I get people to show up, but instead once they show up how can I incrementally improve the experience I offer them. In this environment it was easy for a Jewish leader to get complacent. There was no reason to build the set of skills necessary to institute non-incremental change for your institution. If you made small improvements you could consistently balance your budget and cater to a reasonably sizable mass of congregants. 

The challenge is that those same leaders experienced the rapid deterioration of their value proposition and within a relatively short time period were forced to evolve into change makers. For many, this change maker role required an entirely different set of skills than they had built previously.

2. Lack of lay leaders with complementary skill sets

When an institution is firing on all cylinders it’s easy to lose focus on the engagement of high quality lay leaders. My mom ran a highly functioning summer camp that was consistently filled every year that generated a budgetary surplus. It probably felt less important at the time to pull together a cohesive, strategically appropriate group of lay leaders to steward the institution since the institution consistently performed very well. Unfortunately there are an array of institutions whose engagement has significantly degraded in the past 20-30 years and the same attitude toward recruiting capable lay leaders has remained the way it was when the institution was thriving. As a result, our professional leaders lack partners with complementary skill sets that can push their thinking and help compensate for skill sets they lack themselves.

3. Lack of scale means leaders have no time to think

Of all the challenges listed here this may be the least appreciated. A typical byproduct of declining sustainability is the trimming of other overhead resources. The leaders of our institutions have been forced to cut down on the resources they use to support their leadership. This means that those same leaders have been forced to wear more hats than they previously had to wear. This in turn has created the inability to do the core job of a leader which is to envision the future.

Lay leaders on the other hand continue to hold our professional leaders to the same bar they did previously. They want their professional leader to balance the budget AND envision the future. I’ve seen this play out in my local work with day schools where the schools with the most scale (revenue and balance sheet) typically are able to afford their leaders more time to plan proactively for the future. On the other side, the leaders of our smaller schools are forced spend more of their time in execution mode dealing with the day to day challenges of running a school without sufficient time to think about the future. This isn’t an intentional decision smaller institutional leaders make, but is a necessity to keep their heads above water.

4. Building sunk cost

Our institution’s buildings are a blessing and a curse. The blessing is the continued appreciation of real estate values. Many of our institutions are housed on pieces of land that have dramatically appreciated in the past 30 years and those assets are sellable and rentable. My current synagogue, Temple Reyim, leveraged its property to create a relationship with Hebrew College that brought it more capital, a greater wealth of operating expenses, enhanced programming, and allowed it a positive expansion of its mission. 

The curse of our buildings is the necessity of fitting our programming into the building itself. Many of our buildings were designed for use cases from 30-40 years ago and we try to wedge new programming use cases into them. Running a program for families with kids under the age of 5 is possible in the windowless basement of a synagogue, but it doesn’t compare favorably with the alternatives our families have today in the secular world. 

Themes for change

I don’t want to minimize the challenge of solving the problems above. No article can reasonably state solutions that are actionable enough to make a difference in the short term. These are merely suggestions of themes that our institutions can use. 

Hire leaders that fit the challenges of tomorrow

I believe our community has come to grips with the importance of having the best leaders possible that sit on top of our institutions. The creation of organizations like Leading Edge echo the community’s desire to support our leaders. The Wexner and Schusterman Foundations (among others) have long been stewards of high quality leadership development programs. 

The question is how well we leverage opportunities of transition to find leaders that can handle today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. 

This starts with a job description that truthfully and accurately captures the organization’s challenges and is sufficiently open with the candidate pool and the community about those challenges. If done well, a provocative job description can open up avenues to hire a candidate that doesn’t fit the typical mold the community might expect from the next person that holds the role. With the right job description in hand, most notably the head of the search committee needs to have the courage to put forward candidates that don’t fit the typical mold that the board might have in their head to handle its most pressing opportunities.

Having been on boards that have explored traditionally non conventional candidates I can attest to how challenging it can be to entertain the candidacy of someone who on paper doesn’t look like the leaders of the past. The onus leans heavily upon the chair of the search committee to make the case for these candidates. Search committee chairs and their committee members spend orders of magnitude more time with the candidates relative to boards. It’s up to the search committee chair to not only develop the conviction in a particular candidate, but to also spend the energy to educate board members on that person’s candidacy. This is hard and time consuming work, but can have dramatic impacts on the trajectory of an organization.

Spend more energy on governance and nominating

This is arguably the least sexy committee on any board, but arguably the most important given the set of factors described above. Similar to the GM of a sports team, this committee chair is responsible for putting the right players on the field. In this analogy if the Board Chair is the coach, there is only so much the coach can do if he isn’t given the right players. At its best cultivating new lay leaders is strategic. Some boards decide to bring new lay leaders in on committees that require a bit less time or perhaps specialized expertise. Those experiences allow the potential board member to get to know the organization and vice versa (A Triple A or Double A appointment in a baseball version of our sports analogy). In cases where that lay leader had no affinity to the organization it can inspire them with the organization’s mission. At best these relationships help the board understand that lay leader’s skill set sufficiently to figure out how they fit into the particular needs of the board.

As a community we might consider how to elevate nominating committees and spend more time figuring out how to appropriately resource them to meet this challenge. 

Make capital improvements in the context of use cases

A constant struggle for Jewish institutions is how to fix dilapidated buildings. There is an inevitable cycle of systems that break down or the draw of updating portions of buildings that look like a relic of a past era. The temptation is to focus on the superficial and give our buildings a ‘facelift’ that serves to retain their character while perhaps broadening their appeal for a younger audience.

The work that we tend to avoid is asking the question of how we evolve our buildings to the use cases that will better serve the demographic we serve.

I’ve seen something similar with building online products where the tendency can be to build on top of what you have. The shiny object is always the data that is staring you in the face to make the product 1% better or the customer feedback you receive that warrants a ‘quick fix’. Some businesses that are doing well can afford to increment their products in this way. Other businesses though that are either startups that haven’t honed in on the right product/customer fit or are struggling businesses that are flat or declining can’t afford to chip away with 1% improvements. They need strategies and ‘bigger swings’ to reverse their declines. This involves rigorous thinking that is both long term in nature as well as the ability to back those long term strategies into short term actions (see previous article on the power of customer insights in these situations).

This long/short method is the kind of approach our struggling institutions need to adopt and our buildings are a key asset in getting us there. Many of our institutions cannot afford to think incrementally. These building decisions are important because: a) There is a temptation to spend massive amounts of valuable community capital on them and therefore not on other things and b) Buildings can be an amazing asset to further the goals of an institution.

Let’s say the institution is a synagogue with a building that is in decline but has a healthy enough donor base to fuel some significant enhancements. The synagogue has identified families with young children as an opportunity. Maybe they are located in a suburb that has been the beneficiary of a growing population of Jewish young families. They’ve started to see these families show up at random programs here and there. They’ve seen articles and perhaps studies of their local population to suggest that the market exists. They’ve studied the competition to know where they are falling short. They possess a vibrant programming leader who can excel under the right conditions and with the right assets.

In a situation like this it’s worth asking how a building can be used to fuel programming and community among this population. Maybe this is a good time to really invest in a top tier Early Childhood Center (as only one example strategy). Temple Beth Shalom in Needham here in Boston adopted a strategy like this. They thoughtfully built out a space that is tailor made for kids. They thought of everything from the lighting in the space, to how to build out their library to be more than just a house for books, to how to build kid friendly fixtures into the walls. They combined it with an incredible leader and that center is now one of the top centers in Greater Boston with long waiting lists and glowing reviews.

Compensate for leadership’s lack of time

We need to acknowledge the energy our leaders require to manage organizations without a sufficient level of overhead. It’s up to both the leader to be self aware about their predicament and also up to the board chair to be empathetic to that leader and acknowledge the full scope of their energy. Ideally this is where a complementary partnership comes into play between the leader and board chair. I’ve seen how hard it can be to get a lay leader interested enough to take on the role of board chair regardless of how their skills complement the leaders, but it’s important to go beyond that and profile future lay leaders to find the person that is a good fit for the organization’s needs.

With the right lay leader in place the professional needs to be strategic about how to lean on their board chair without crossing the line into having that lay leader become a de facto operator. This is hard work but requires a professional leader obsessed with self improvement and doing what’s best for the organization. In a situation like this the capacity for thoughtful self reflection becomes a skill lay leaders should look for in times of leadership transition.

Conclusion

For some of our institutions, in particular those that don’t possess a strong secular use case, the societal forces stacked against them are significant. These situations don’t lend themselves to easy incremental solutions. None of the solutions contained in this article are easy. I know that there are plenty of organizations who already recognize the importance of some of the attributes described above. We can only hope that the already significant level of commitment our lay leaders bring to the work can increase even further and strategically complement the skills of our professional leaders.

The Business of Jewish is written by Ari Sussman. Ari is a Boston based consultant to Jewish non profits. The son of Jewish professionals, he combines a 20 year career developing new products for internet companies with 12 years of board service for Jewish organizations. Read here to learn more. If you’d like to sign up to receive Ari’s free bi-weekly email, you can do so here.