As a nonprofit leader, you have an intuitive understanding of this core truth:
- You don’t stop paying attention to your fundraising strategy once you’ve built it.
- You keep cultivating donor relationships, track what’s working, and adjust when something shifts.
The moment you take your eye off it, things start to slip.
Nonprofit workplace culture works the same way. It’s not a one-off project.
One leader I interviewed for the U.S. Nonprofit Culture Pulse research put it plainly: culture is “every day, everywhere, everything, the good and the bad of it.”
Not an initiative with a start and end date.
It lives in every meeting, decision, and conversation between a manager and their team.
Three signs you’re treating culture like a project instead of a practice:
- Culture conversations only happen during strategic planning or after something goes wrong.
- You finished a values exercise or staff survey and haven’t revisited either since.
- Your leadership team can articulate the desired culture, but can’t describe what it looks like in a specific meeting or decision.
If those sound familiar, you’re not alone.
I’ve helped many clients who have been where you are to improve culture on their teams and across their organizations.
An example:
I was speaking with a client who’s the CEO of a nonprofit association with nearly 30 staff. She was concerned about how stuck her leaders were in the old ways, back when the organization had 10 or 15 people.
Back when she could communicate everything important by standing in the hallway and saying, “Hey, listen up!”
Back when collaboration happened naturally, because everyone worked in the same office space, bumped into each other in the break room, and had worked together for years.
Things are different now.
- She has departments and divisions.
- The senior leadership team includes some people promoted from within and others who joined recently.
- Not everyone works the same schedule, and with a hybrid setup, people aren’t even in the office on the same days.
The informal ties that once held the team together now need intentional support.
Growth Changes Everything
For the first time in a while, this CEO has space to look up from daily operations and focus on something bigger: the organization’s strategic purpose and the culture that supports or works against it.
It reminded me of a Gloria Steinem quote I love:
“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”
Plans start with dreams.
Nonprofit workplace culture is no different – before you can build something intentional, you have to imagine it.
My client said something I never get tired of hearing.
“It’s all about the people. Everyone here joined because of what we can do together. And now that we’ve grown, we have more people challenges. They’re manageable, but they need ongoing attention.”
She wants to build on the organization’s strengths before things become harder to untangle. She wants to get ahead of it.
She’s a leader who sees culture as a strategic asset, not a problem to solve after the fact.
That’s my favorite kind of client.
Awareness is where the work starts. Sometimes that means pausing to take an honest look at where your culture actually is today, not where you hope it is, before deciding where you want it to go.
If you’re curious about where your culture stands, my Culture Threads Assessment is a good place to start.
P.S. Want more insights like this?
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