When Frederic Fournier was sent to Mazar-i-Shariff, Afghanistan, in 1996, he was to lead a small sub-delegation for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC): five expatriates and 100 Afghans. Two weeks after he started, Kabul fell to the Taliban, changing the political climate radically. “I ended up managing up to 35 expatriates at a time and more than 200 Afghan nationals, as well as opening four additional offices throughout Afghanistan,” says Fournier of his first management experience.

Although he’d joined the ICRC because of its noble mission, he found that, as a manager, much of his daily routine had little to do with direct humanitarian work. The greatest challenges were not always related to living conditions or safety or geography, but mundane issues of human resources, such as internal communication and performance reviews. “If you are in a management position, very often human resources can take 60 to 70 percent of your time,” says Fournier, who has since managed sub-delegations in Indonesia and Iraq. He most recently headed the ICRC mission in Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories.

That’s why Fournier, who earned a master’s in international relations from Maxwell in 1994, is back this year, on leave from the ICRC to earn a master’s in public administration. He’s specializing in public and nonprofit management, training he believes will provide the perfect complement to his I.R. degree. (The I.R. degree Fournier earned in 1994 was a general social science degree; since then, the degree program has been redesigned to provide more professional training.)

“I’ve learned that motivation and good will alone do not suffice to render humanitarian work successful,” he says. “I can be the best analyst of the political situation in Afghanistan, but if I can’t communicate it to my staff, it’s worthless.”

“Traditionally, most nonprofit managers did not receive formal management training or degrees,” says Arthur Brooks, associate professor of public administration and an instructor in the M.P.A. program’s nonprofit management sequence. There has been a notable increase over the past two years in students interested in studying nonprofits at Maxwell—a trend seen at policy schools nationwide.

“Management training is increasingly important,” says Brooks, “because the technical demands on managers are increasing. Nonprofit executive directors are expected to understand far more about areas such as performance evaluation, financial management, and fund­raising techniques than they ever have been in the past. It’s not enough just to care. You also have to be able to execute an organization’s operations efficiently.”

In addition, there has been tremendous growth in the number of nonprofit organizations incorporated in the United States in the last two decades. In­creasingly, the government is distributing responsibilities to nonprofits. 

In response, Brooks says, the nonprofit sector is professionalizing. “People with M.P.A. or M.B.A. degrees are entering the nonprofit job market directly at the middle management level—even with little prior work experience.”

Maxwell’s top-ranked M.P.A. program has had a nonprofit management sequence for seven years. Unlike an M.B.A., “the M.P.A. degree helps students develop a rich understanding of how government and nonprofit organizations can work and are working together to solve complex social problems,” says Mary Tschirhart, associate professor of public administration. “Many nonprofit organizations receive a large percentage of their resources from government.  Understanding government helps students planning to work as nonprofit managers see how to influence and manage these resource flows.”   

For Fournier, that could include developing ways to reward and motivate employees whose cultural backgrounds bring them to their jobs for different reasons. It might mean making assignments based not only on skills, but an employee’s psychological state. “I need to be able to tell when someone has seen too much,” he says.

Fournier has no idea where he’ll be sent once he’s completed his degree. Whatever the locale, he’s hoping that his time at Maxwell will help human-resource and budget tasks become second nature. “The less time I have to spend figuring out the right thing to do, the more time I’ll have to carry out the ICRC mission.”

—Renée Gearhart Levy

This article appeared in the Spring 2003 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2003 Maxwell School of Syracuse University. To request a copy, e-mail dlcooke@maxwell.syr.edu.