With extensive experience in nonprofit leadership, Bob Giannino has had a transformative impact in advancing opportunity, access, and equity on a national scale.
As Senior Vice President and co-leader of Lindauer’s Advocacy Practice, he provides strategic counsel and talent and recruitment expertise to organizations who are engaged in addressing the world’s most urgent challenges.
In this Q&A, Bob draws on his own leadership journey to share insights on recognizing potential in emerging leaders, engaging teams by inspiring trust, and learning to apply one’s existing skills and strengths in new leadership positions.
How do you see yourself as a leader, and how has your approach to leadership evolved over time?
I’ve always focused on driving organizational change by strengthening the people, institutions, and ecosystems I’ve been a part of. One of the pillars of effective leadership is good management: investing in talent development, mentorship, and putting people in a position to create meaningful impact.
My early professional experiences shaped my ideas about leadership. When I transitioned from the private sector into the nonprofit sector, I had mentors who gave me practical guidance as well as a model for what a purpose-driven career could look like.
As I progressed in my leadership journey, I began to understand how strong organizational structures and talented people can significantly influence change. One of the most important responsibilities a leader has is to engage and motivate people around a common goal. When I realized that, I knew my leadership orientation needed to be about identifying, developing, and sustaining talent.
Why are you so passionate about finding and developing future leaders?
Because I benefited from others who saw my potential and enabled my development, I feel a responsibility to carry that legacy forward.
Looking back on my career, one of the things I’m proudest of is the number of people I’ve worked with who have gone on to lead their own organizations. There’s nothing more fulfilling than seeing your team find their voices as leaders, realize their potential, and achieve great things.
People are the key to an organization’s success. If you take care of your people, they’ll take care of the organization and embrace its mission in profound ways. Early in my career, I saw this at work in the private sector at Procter & Gamble, which had a “promote-from-within” culture that nurtured emerging talent and created an environment for strong leaders to emerge. Later, one of my earliest bosses and mentors, Rob Waldron, the CEO of Jumpstart, helped reinforce the importance of investing in people. He taught me that one of a CEO’s primary roles is to identify potential in your team and create opportunities for them to grow as professionals and contribute meaningfully to the organization.
As executive recruiters, we know the impact leaders have as the core drivers of organizational culture. How did you create an institutional culture that cultivates growth and leadership?
Identifying and growing talent isn’t a linear process—it’s more art than science. But for me, building strong organizational cultures that nurture and maximize people’s talents comes down to intentionality and balance.
Intentionality helps foster an environment centered around growth. As a leader, you have to give people opportunities to fail, to learn, and to grow, providing feedback and creating learning cycles that support their development. Giving people the space to stretch also creates the redundancy needed for talent succession; when someone moves on, there will be an emerging leader ready to step into that role.
I also believe in balancing work and life to ensure employees thrive in both spaces. This margin allows for creativity and growth. Leaders are responsible for creating the structures, policies, and procedures that make work-life balance, or integration, possible. Just as importantly, however, leaders are responsible for modeling this balance in their own conduct and behavior, and this is something I have always aimed to do.
A recent Gallup report emphasized the role of trust in developing engaged teams. What do you see as the best ways to build trust within an organization?
It is essential to build trust in the workplace, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach that will work for every organization. Each organization and individual is unique, and so leaders must tailor trust-building practices to the people, goals, and opportunities within their institutional environment.
I’ve found that communication is paramount in every scenario. This means not only being consistent and following through on what you as a leader are communicating, but also providing employees with opportunities to use their voices and demonstrating that their input leads to tangible change.
Many leaders have an “open door policy,” but this is rarely enough. You need to initiate and provide spaces and venues in which employees are comfortable communicating. Trust develops through a shared understanding that everyone is working toward the same goals; a shared understanding arises out of intentional communication.
Revenue-generating skills, including fundraising, seem to be increasingly sought after across a range of executive-level nonprofit positions. As someone who made the transition into leadership roles with significant fundraising responsibility and mentored other leaders to make similar transitions, do you have advice for emerging leaders who may not have this background already?
Today, all nonprofits are looking for a CEO with strong fundraising skills. Sustainability in this sector relies heavily on leveraging the core tenets of the field of advancement: engaging a variety of donors and stakeholders and inspiring them with a shared vision.
My own fundraising journey wasn’t easy. I started by developing the hard skills, like giving presentations and running cost-benefit analyses to calculate return on investment. But I realized that many of the softer skills, like listening and persuasive storytelling, were skills I already had and just needed to learn how to apply in new ways. I leaned heavily on my sales experience and continuously asked for feedback to improve.
Finding an environment where you are supported and can learn from those who excel at fundraising will be essential to your growth as a nonprofit leader at any level.
What energizes you about your role as an executive recruiter with Lindauer?
I see an organization as a puzzle and its people as the pieces that each play a perfectly complementary role to form a unified whole. I love figuring out how all the pieces of an organization fit together and then identifying the right person to complete that picture. The challenge of that work energizes me, and the prospect of partnering with a range of organizations and having an impact across the entire nonprofit spectrum is very exciting to me.