Something happens in organizations that grow quickly, go through leadership changes, or carry accumulated stress for too long. Working together starts to feel hard. Teams become stressed, off-track, or unable to focus. And somewhere along the way, the nonprofit culture that was supposed to support the mission starts working against it.
Most of the time, it’s a culture problem. And culture problems don’t fix themselves.
When Your Values Are Clear, But Your Culture Isn’t
Most leaders I work with don’t lack values. Their mission and values are on the website and in the strategic plan. And yet:
- The leadership team isn’t fully aligned.
- Staff can list plenty of examples of how daily behaviors don’t match what the organizational leaders say they believe.
- Middle managers are unclear about priorities.
- People have stopped speaking up, not because they don’t care, but because they don’t believe things will change.
You know something needs to shift, but aren’t sure where to start.
That’s the gap culture design is built to close.
Nonprofit Culture Is More Concrete Than People Think
Culture is how your team works together every day.
It shows up in how decisions are made, how people communicate, and whether your values truly shape your work. It shows up in which behaviors are rewarded, which are tolerated, and which are punished.
If you don’t design your nonprofit culture intentionally, it still forms on its own. It just might not be the one you want.
What a Strong, Intentional Culture Makes Possible
When organizations invest in culture work, the results aren’t abstract. They show up in how the team functions day to day:
- Clearer decision-making and alignment
- Greater trust and collaboration instead of competition
- Higher engagement and motivation
- Stronger ability to navigate growth and change
- A workplace where people thrive
One participant from a client engagement described what shifted after doing this work:
“Literally everything — communicating, working together, contributing toward goals, recognizing the strengths of others, admitting our own weaknesses, seeking help.”
That kind of shift doesn’t happen by accident. It happens by design.
Where Culture Design Starts: Assessment and Design
Before you can build the culture you want, you need an honest picture of the one you have. That’s the starting point for every engagement I do, and for most leaders, it’s also where the real value lives.
Culture Threads Assessment
This is where the work begins. The Culture Threads Assessment reveals where your organization’s values show up in action, and where they don’t. You walk away with a shared understanding of your current culture across teams: strengths, blind spots, and priorities. For many leaders, this step alone surfaces things they suspected but couldn’t name, or confirms patterns they’d never been able to see clearly.
Culture Design Playbook
Using insights from the assessment, we can co-create your Culture Design Playbook, a practical, living reference point for how your organization works at its best: how you lead, decide, and collaborate with intention. This is where the assessment turns into a plan you can actually act on.
Culture in Practice (as needed)
Some organizations are ready to stop here and put the playbook to work on their own. Others want support putting it into daily practice: piloting new ways of working, coaching leaders to model the behaviors they’ve defined, and integrating the playbook into existing systems and rhythms. When that support makes sense, it’s available. But the assessment and the design work are where clarity comes from, and that’s the foundation everything else builds on.
This Is Not a Theoretical Exercise
The work is structured around the Culture Design Canvas, a framework developed by Gustavo Razzetti of Fearless Culture. The Canvas organizes nonprofit culture into three interconnected areas: Alignment, Belonging, and Collaboration.
Alignment covers purpose, values, priorities, and the behaviors that either reinforce your culture or undermine it.
Belonging addresses psychological safety, feedback, and the rituals and routines that shape whether people feel valued and heard.
Collaboration looks at decision-making, meetings, and the spoken and unspoken norms that govern how work actually gets done.
The Canvas makes culture visible. That’s what makes it actionable.
What Nonprofit Leaders Say About Culture
For the 2025 U.S. Nonprofit Culture Pulse report, I interviewed leaders across the sector about how nonprofit culture actually works inside their organizations. A few things came up repeatedly.
The gap between stated values and daily reality is common, and leaders often know it exists. One HR leader described conducting a formal culture audit and scoring in the bottom fifth percentile globally, and then watching senior leadership respond without urgency. That disconnect signaled how seriously, or not seriously, culture was being taken at the top.
The executives who were making progress shared a common thread: they had stopped treating culture as a project with a finish line. One leader put it plainly: “Culture is every day, everywhere, everything — the good and the bad of it.” Another described the challenge of helping middle managers understand that all the work is culture work — that every conversation, every decision, every interaction is an opportunity to reinforce or undermine the culture they’re trying to build.
The leaders who were furthest along in building strong cultures were also the most specific. Rather than talking about culture in general terms, they were naming behaviors, tracking indicators, and building culture into how they hired, onboarded, and evaluated performance. As one interviewee said: “Be intentional about defining the culture and provide support around that definition — whether it be through metrics, behaviors, hiring practices, accountability measures, rewards, or recognition. Everything should support the culture you’re trying to create.”
That kind of specificity starts with an honest look at where you actually stand.
Where to Start
If your team feels disconnected or misaligned, another workshop, meeting, or strategic plan won’t fix it. Designing your culture with clarity, shared purpose, and consistent action will.
It starts with seeing your culture clearly. The Culture Threads Assessment is built to do exactly that.
Curious what a Culture Threads Assessment could reveal about your organization? Learn more about the assessment and let’s talk about where to start.
P.S. Not ready for an assessment yet? Subscribe to the Culture Threads newsletter for more on what’s really shaping your culture, delivered weekly.
