A father once threw a chair across my office. He was furious! All he wanted was to send his daughter to college, an opportunity that he never had when he was her age. Without more financial aid, her college education seemed to be slipping out of his grasp.
Twenty minutes later, he walked out much more calmly than he had walked in. While I wasn’t able to increase her aid package, we explored a few other options. After he picked up the thrown chair and exited the office, a colleague asked how I’d calmed him down.
The honest answer? Mostly, I just listened. I slowed the conversation down, heard him out, and then helped him explore other options.
If you’d told me then that I’d become a nonprofit culture consultant, I would have laughed. Back then, “culture” was exactly the kind of empty corporate buzzword I avoided.
I didn’t realize it then, but that moment revealed an approach I would come back to, time after time, year after year. Whether my title was Associate Director of Financial Aid (then), Senior Consultant (later), or Culture Designer and Lead Facilitator (now), I’ve instinctively followed that same style when working with teams—listen first to understand what’s real for them, explore what they want (both said and unsaid), then collaborate to help them explore options for moving forward.
Throughout most of my career, I’ve worked with teams that helped people in one way or another.
- When I was in higher education administration, I led teams that helped students get the financial aid they needed to support their education goals.
- When I was an information technology project manager, I formed and led many teams. I brought together individuals who did not know one another, helped them understand the project’s purpose, build relationships and trust, establish roles and responsibilities, define priorities, collaborate on decisions, and set expectations about expected behaviors.
- As a facilitator, listening to understand, especially when tension is high and trust is fragile, has always been a key component when I work with groups.
Why I Avoided Culture Work for Years
For years, I didn’t realize that my work was about building “culture”.
In fact, I wouldn’t use the term “culture” because I had known too many new leaders who would unveil shiny new lists of values at all-hands meetings, print posters with words like teamwork and innovation, and then do nothing more, so nothing actually changed – all in the guise of improving “culture”. Middle managers kept operating the same way. Policies didn’t shift. Staff learned that this version of “culture” was still just talk.
I began associating the word “culture” with fluff. Warm words. Big announcements. Little follow-through.
My consulting career evolved, and organizations continued hiring me to help teams rebuild trust, improve communication, and collaborate under pressure. I conducted workshops to help people feel safe to speak up, to learn how to give and received feedback, to improve how decisions were made, to clarify roles and responsibilities, to restructure their meetings so they could be more effective.
All these were intentional and tangible, not fluff. So I still didn’t refer to my work as “culture”.
I was wrong.
The Pattern I Couldn’t Ignore
Along my journey from financial aid office to IT consulting, I managed complex systems projects across nonprofits, government agencies, and private-sector firms. I assembled teams of people from different functional areas with competing priorities and found ways to help them work together toward a common goal.
My role began with much planning, task management, and problem solving. One year, I received a fire extinguisher as a holiday gift because I was always putting out fires. And throughout all that, most of those fires were results of people problems, not computer problems.
I finally realized that my role and my passion were about more than timelines and deliverables—I was solving people problems. Some colleagues started referring to me as the glue that held projects together.
Before long, I had a reputation: “Got a team that isn’t working well together? Call Linda.”
At the time, I thought that was about my facilitation or project management skills.
Now I realize that the glue was how the team’s culture had improved to a point where people were working together, communicating more effectively, and focusing their strengths and skills in a way that helped them avoid crises before they happened.
Not putting out fires, but preventing them in the first place.
While I thought I was simply focusing on people problems, I had been instinctively helping these teams build stronger cultures all along.
The glue wasn’t me; the glue was the culture—the often invisible force that holds teams together or causes them to fall apart.
Finally Seeing What Was Always There
A few years ago, I looked back at every client engagement I had ever had and realized that the word I had been ignoring was more present than I had thought.
Almost all my clients in the last decade were nonprofits or purpose-driven organizations, the exact audience I now serve as a culture designer, and the work was remarkably consistent: rebuilding trust after turnover, improving communication between leadership and staff, clarifying decision-making processes, strengthening feedback and accountability, and helping teams collaborate effectively under pressure.
This was the work I had done for years; I just hadn’t called it culture.
Training to Become a Culture Designer
In 2023, I attended the Culture Design Masterclass led by Gustavo Razzetti, founder of Fearless Culture. For the first time, I saw culture presented not as values on a poster, but as something intentionally designed. His framework was practical, observable, and actionable.
I realized I hadn’t been rejecting culture change. I had always rejected contrived, performative talk about culture change – the kind of change that shows up as new branding, one-time workshops about how the new culture will function, words on posters, and motivational speeches at all-hands meetings.
The Culture Design Canvas put language and structure around what I’d been doing by instinct. It connected behaviors, systems, leadership signals, and decision-making into something coherent and real.
I’ve made it a key component of my work by becoming certified and joining his team as a Fearless Culture Associate.
Culture as a Practice
No workshop or retreat alone can solve culture challenges.
What actually works is getting clear on what matters most, setting expectations people can meet, and putting structures in place that allow people to do their jobs well without burning out.
Culture isn’t something you “fix.” That language assumes there’s an endpoint to culture work. Culture is ongoing, never-ending.
Culture is something you deliberately shape and practice. It’s about intentionally designing how people will work together and prioritizing where stronger alignment, trust, and clarity will most strengthen the organization.
How Culture Consulting Works in Practice
One nonprofit leader I worked with noticed that after adding several new positions and transitioning some staff to remote work, their culture felt “off”. People weren’t speaking up anymore. Instead of airing concerns directly, they talked about each other behind closed doors. The openness that had worked for the organization was gone.
Instead of continuing to wonder why, she decided to act.
We mapped the organization’s current culture through structured conversations. The team clarified their purpose, identified unacceptable behaviors they had been tolerating, and named the norms—both written and unwritten—that shaped daily interactions.
They focused on having conversations they’d been avoiding, learned to give and receive feedback, and built stronger connections among newer staff.
At our final session, I asked: “What feels easier today than it did six months ago?” One person answered: “Literally everything. Communicating. Working together. Recognizing strengths. Asking for help.“
The leadership team now has clarity about what to prioritize. Staff reported reduced tension, greater openness, and a greater willingness to face challenges together.
My Journey to Becoming a Culture Consultant
There’s a quiet irony in all of this.
When I started my company nearly twenty years ago, I designed my logo to represent threads intertwined and woven together to be stronger.
Look closely and you’ll even see an “H” woven into the design. Even then, long before I explicitly focused on culture, the image resonated with me.
Individual threads have value. Strength, durability, and beauty come from how they’re woven together.
Culture works the same way. People, values, systems, behaviors, and decision-making are threads. When intentionally woven, organizations become resilient. When the threads are misaligned, even the strongest organizations begin to fray.
Strong cultures aren’t built overnight. And they aren’t soft or fluffy. They’re structural.
Like a building, culture needs a foundation, a framework, and systems that support the people inside it. As those elements come together, habits form and behaviors become normalized.
This is culture.
And just like that father in my office all those years ago, organizations can move forward even when circumstances are hard—when the answer isn’t more money or more people or easier conditions. What changes is how people work together through the difficulty and uncertainty. How they come together and collaborate on solutions. That’s what makes the difference between teams that fray under pressure and teams that hold together and stay strong.
Strong leaders know their mission depends not only on what their organizations produce, but on how their people work together and how the work demonstrates their commitment to one another, to the mission, and to the communities they serve.
Working Together: What’s Next for Your Nonprofit
If the challenges in this article sound familiar, you don’t have to tackle everything at once. Culture work can start with small and tangible steps—with one area where stronger alignment would make the biggest difference.
As a certified culture designer, I work with purpose-driven leaders to identify specific starting points and design practical next steps that fit how your organization actually operates. If you’re ready to move from wondering about culture to doing something about it, let’s start with a conversation.
P.S. Want practical resources for strengthening your culture? Subscribe to Culture Threads, my newsletter with actionable ideas for improving the various threads that hold organizations together.
P.P.S If you’re curious about what other nonprofit leaders are experiencing, check out the 2025 US Nonprofit Culture Pulse report
