I have never met a nonprofit manager who did not initially avoid firing someone.

It runs directly against many of the principles that bring people into nonprofit work in the first place. We value inclusion, relationships, dignity, repair, and the belief that people can grow.

But firing people is also a necessary part of management.

And it may be one of the most emotionally intense and activating parts of the job.

A termination requires a manager to tell someone that they are no longer part of the group. It formally challenges that person’s performance, conduct, judgment, or fit. In a single conversation, the manager must end belonging and deliver a blow to respect—two things most of us spend the rest of our working lives trying to protect.

Doing that clearly, compassionately, and without making the employee manage the manager’s distress requires sophisticated emotional regulation.

Most managers have never been taught how.

I’ll Come In And Get My Stuff

You know you are working in a small nonprofit when you have to teach the person firing you how to do it.

It was a phone call after I had completely missed a Zoom meeting. I could hear her nerves before she even got the sentence out. Deep breath. “I’m afraid we are going to have to let you go.”

I had fired people before, so I knew the mechanics better than she did: the paperwork, what came next, and what to ask about final pay.

She did not.

She was not mean. She was not even especially dysregulated. She was just profoundly uncomfortable.

“I mean, I hate to do this. I mean, I actually really like you,” she said when I arrived at the office half an hour later, in tears, to return the laptop and collect my personal belongings. Our dogs had gone on playdates together.

The four other staff members stood around the open office making awkward small talk. They did not want to be there either.

The whole thing appeared to have been decided at the last minute, probably by our boss on the West Coast, who had grown fed up with me missing meetings. I’ll never know exactly how the decision was made.

What I do know is that the person assigned to carry it out was unprepared and ambivalent, and we worked in an organization where no one’s actual job was to know how to do this.

I found myself trying to make her feel better while I packed up my plant. She escorted me to my car and hugged me goodbye.

I had just lost my job.

Somehow, I was also responsible for helping my boss learn how to fire me.

Subscribe now

A firing is an ambush

The final moment of a firing is an ambush, even when the performance concerns leading up to it are not.

The ambush process is emotionally activating for everyone it touches.

It activates the manager before the meeting even starts, since they already know they are walking into an uncomfortable conversation. It activates the employee the moment they realize what is happening. And if it is not handled with containment, it activates everyone else in the office, who register it less as someone else’s termination and more as a live signal about their own security. Could this happen to me?

A good firing has to contain all three: the manager’s anticipation, the employee’s shock, and the wider staff’s fear about their own security.

Belonging and Respect

Timing is only part of what makes firing hard to sit with. The content of the decision does the rest.

Most workplace relationships run on two things: belonging and respect.

You are part of the group. Your competence and judgment are trusted.

Firing someone violates both, on purpose and by design.

It ends belonging outright. It also states, formally, that something about the person’s performance, conduct, or fit did not meet the organization’s standard. Saying that out loud formally challenges the employee’s standing, even when the reasons are legitimate.

By the time they are in the room, most managers have come to terms with the need to fire an individual employee. They can list the reasons, stand behind the process, and still feel the weight of being the one who has to say it out loud. Agreement with the outcome does not cancel the discomfort of enacting it. The manager is not activated because they doubt the decision. They are activated because they are the one publicly breaking a norm they believe in, even in service of it.

It is one thing to hold belonging and respect as values. It is another to be the one who has to violate them on purpose, even if it is in service to the wider community.

Human beings are built to register exclusion as dangerous. For most of our history, safety depended on remaining connected to other people. Being pushed outside the group carried real consequences. So did becoming the person who pushed someone else out.

The body can register that as a threat before the conscious mind has fully made sense of it. It responds to severing a bond and threatening someone’s place in the group much as it responds to other forms of danger: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

In that moment, a manager’s job is to end someone’s belonging and challenge their respect in a single conversation. The four responses that follow are what can happen when they do not have the coping skills to tolerate the intensity of doing it.

Flight: Not It.

Flight is what happens when the emotional cost of ending the relationship becomes too much for the person holding the authority. Firing requires actively participating in the loss of a relationship. To avoid that, the person becomes physically or emotionally unavailable.

The senior leader makes the decision but skips the meeting. The executive director sends a middle manager who cannot answer questions. The employee receives an email, a locked account, or a meeting invitation from someone who cannot explain what is happening.

Sometimes the manager is physically present but still leaves.

They read a sentence, hand the conversation to someone else, and emotionally withdraw. They defer every question. They distance themselves from the decision with phrases like:

“This came from above.”

“I was not involved.”

“This is not really my decision.”

This is where a third-party witness can help. A witness can steady the room, hold the structure, and co-regulate with the person delivering the decision, so their activation does not transfer to the employee.

Coregulation is a physiological process. One stable nervous system creates a baseline steady enough for another to borrow from.

The witness helps the person delivering the decision stay present for it. That is the job, not taking over the termination or shielding them from the emotional fallout.

Freeze: What Was I Saying?

Freeze is the manager who goes blank.

They forget what they planned to say. They cannot explain when final pay will arrive. They do not know what happens to benefits, accrued leave, files, equipment, or access. Every question gets some version of “I’ll have to get back to you.”

Freeze can happen even to experienced managers.

Underneath it is often a fear of doing more harm. The manager is afraid that the wrong word, the wrong tone, or an answer given too quickly will make the moment worse than it already is. So the brain protects against that risk by refusing to produce an answer at all.

A termination meeting places several demands on the brain at once. The manager is tracking the script, the employee’s reaction, organizational risk, practical logistics, and the fear that they will say something harmful. Working memory narrows under stress. That is why the plan cannot live only in someone’s head.

Put the relevant information in writing. One copy for the employee, one for the organization: the decision and the reason being communicated, the effective date, final pay, benefits, property return, access to files and systems, next steps, and a contact for follow-up questions.

This is a coping skill: externalizing the information. When working memory narrows under stress, the plan cannot live only in someone’s head. Moving it onto paper means the manager does not have to generate it in real time, they only have to locate it.

The document gives both people something to orient toward while the room is emotionally charged. It keeps the manager from improvising or adding something that was never meant to become part of the termination.

It also gives the manager somewhere neutral to look when sustained eye contact becomes too intense. Locate the next point. Return to the language that was already prepared instead of filling the silence with something said in the moment and regretted later.

Refer back to the page. Do not go off script.

I was once fired from a job where I was the only person who understood the IT setup on our office computers. On my way out, I tried to clear my login information so the organization could still access the machine without me.

I could not do it. I was too activated to think clearly, fumbling through steps I normally knew without effort. The executive director watched me struggle and asked what I was doing, as though I might be attempting something sneaky. I said something like, “Okay, you deal with it,” and left. The problem stayed unresolved because neither of us had the capacity to solve it in that moment.

That is what freeze looks like from the inside. A brain trying to hold too much at once and failing to produce the next step.

Fawn: You’re ok, I’m ok

Fawn is the manager who talks too much when they are uncomfortable.

They are trying to make the moment feel survivable, and the fastest route they know is making the employee feel better first. If the employee feels better, the manager feels better. The relief is borrowed from the other person’s reaction instead of managed internally.

That is why fawn says one thing while doing another. “I think you’re wonderful.” “This has nothing to do with you as a person.” “Now you can write the great American novel.” “We’re all going to miss you so much.”

That last one was said to me, in an open office, half an hour after I'd been fired over the phone. My boss hugged me goodbye. I helped her feel better while I packed up my plant.

Another manager in another job was so uncomfortable that she talked around the purpose of the meeting for several minutes. Because everyone else was already in the room, I assumed I had missed the invitation to a team meeting.

I did not realize I was being fired until the executive director finally looked at me and said, “You’re fired.”

The coping skill here is containment: deciding in advance how much will be said and stopping there.

State the decision. State the reason being communicated. Stop.

Your feelings do not belong in the room. Take them to a supervisor, a colleague, a therapist—on the drive home—but do not ask the person losing their job to hold them for you.

Fight: Look at What You Made Me Do

Fight is what happens when the manager’s activation gets pushed outward instead of managed internally.

The room fills with more people than the moment requires. The manager lists every frustration they have ever had with the employee. Questions get treated as defiance. Confusion gets treated as manipulation. Anger is met with more anger.

The manager is not just ending the relationship; they are making the employee responsible for having to end it. The activation has to go somewhere, and it goes toward the person on the other side of the desk instead of staying with the person who is actually holding it.

An audience makes that easier to sustain. More people in the room means more validation that the anger is warranted.

Structure can limit the damage, but it cannot create emotional capacity that is not there. A neutral witness may interrupt the worst behavior. A script may reduce the opportunity to relitigate every grievance. A clear endpoint may keep the meeting from expanding indefinitely.

But none of those tools can fully contain a manager who cannot tolerate their own emotional activation. The script becomes something to wave at the employee. The witness becomes another person recruited to confirm that the manager is right. The termination becomes an opportunity to discharge months or years of accumulated frustration.

It has to be built beforehand, through the slower work of learning to experience anger, fear, shame, and loss without transferring them to someone with less power.

If a manager recognizes themselves here, a better script is not enough. They need to learn how to sit with anger, fear, shame, and discomfort without handing those feelings to the employee.

The Actual Work

Co-regulation, externalized information, and containment can meet a manager partway, in the room and in the moment. They can reduce cognitive load, limit improvisation, and help someone remain present.

None of them can make up for missing emotional regulation skills.

For the manager whose emotional activation turns outward, no structural containment technique will be enough. A witness can be recruited against the employee. A script can become a weapon. Structure can limit the damage, but it cannot create emotional capacity on demand.

That work happens long before the meeting.

The actual work in a good firing is managing your own feelings so the person losing their job does not have to clean out their desk and pretend to feel good about it too.

Hi folks.

The sector is very concerned about nonprofit leader burnout right now. There’s probably a webinar or two you could check out on your lunch break. They want to know: Are you okay? What do you need? A four-day week? A sabbatical? A retreat where everyone names their values on sticky notes?

Maybe.

But what would probably help most right now is a moment of honesty.

It’s time for a hard look in the muddy puddle.

You. Are. Not. Okay.

Nonprofit leaders function from a baseline of not okay. When funding never meets need, you are constantly stressed. But you’re also not okay because you’re managing a constant gap between your day-to-day reality and the story you need to tell to keep money coming in.

The job doesn't ask you to lie exactly. It asks you to strengths-base your panic into confidence until you've lost all calibration of your crisis meter.

Strengths-based spin, strategic optimism, the power of “yet”—call it whatever helps you get through the site visit. Sometimes your inside voice just wants to say “this sucks” and call it a day. And that fight is exhausting. But you are not allowed the relief of that moment of truth.

The stress of the spin usually shows up in three places.

Funding. “We’re doing well financially.”
Said to staff while you’re waiting on a grant decision that will determine whether two positions exist in six months. It is true, you are doing ok, right now, today. And sharing every concern about the future risks creating panic before you even know whether there is a real problem to solve. So you sit with that ethical tension.

Then, when the money doesn’t come through, staff experience the notification as betrayal — because to them, it feels sudden. To you, it has been stealing your energy for months.

Capacity. “Sure, we can take that on.”
Said to a funder, partner, or board member because saying no risks the relationship, the grant, or the referral pipeline, and the people counting on all three. So you say yes and figure out later how to manage it. A program stretches. A supervisor stays later. A staff member gets resentful. The bottom line is being protected by spending down people’s capacity.

Self. “I’m fine.”
Said to your board, your staff, your partner, yourself. Because the alternative — acknowledging how close to the edge you actually are — feels like pulling out the key block in the Jenga tower. It all falls apart.

Subscribe now

Working between the lines

You are constantly working to see the bright side and project hope in a high-stakes landscape. Dropping the mask can have real consequences for staff, clients, funding, and organizational survival.

But keeping it up forever has consequences too.

This is the job between the lines of the job description: always translating an unstable reality into a compelling narrative. You get really good at building the track as the train comes barreling down at you. Over time, you start losing access to your own honest read of the situation. If you say it out loud, you will make it real.

Something has to give.

The sector can continue treating leader burnout as a personal wellness problem, or it can confront the conditions that require leaders to perform stability while absorbing relentless uncertainty: short-term, inconsistent funding that chases innovation and rejects the overhead that would make stability possible.

Until that changes, asking whether nonprofit leaders are okay is almost beside the point.

You are doing exactly what the sector requires of you: live in the exhaustion of perpetual spin.

And no, you are not okay.

Further reading

“State of Nonprofits 2026: What Funders Need to Know”
Center for Effective Philanthropy, May 2026

The report draws on survey responses collected in February 2026 and documents a sharp increase in strain across nonprofit organizations:

• 46% of nonprofit CEOs and executive directors said their own burnout was “very much” a concern, up from just under 30% in 2025.

• One quarter said burnout was significantly affecting their staff, up from 17% in 2025.

• 56% said they were managing their organizations in an atmosphere of increased fear.

• Nearly 40% expressed concern about the well-being and safety of their staff and board members.

• 57% said it had become harder to secure foundation grants since January 2025.

It is hard to get nonprofit staff to take vacation.

For once, it isn’t a money issue. The time is budgeted in. It’s probably the only thing that is not a fiscal hardship for the organization. Until the banked time starts rolling over.

Then leadership gets stressed. We suggest, prompt, and mandate. Try to understand what’s going on—usually on a case-by-case individual level: Does she feel too guilty? Is he just not able to trust others to let go? Are they bad at self-care?

Maybe.

But take a look at the org chart, and a different explanation shows up. The “What” is straightforward; the “How” is incredibly nuanced; the “Why” is intractable.

Subscribe now

The What:

Nonprofit jobs are not structurally designed to be vacated.

The sector runs on shoestring budgets, thin staffing, informal coverage, volunteer labor, and people holding too many pieces of the work in their heads. That model keeps the doors open. It doesn’t allow for redundancy—in fact, it actively discourages it. And, without that redundancy, vacation becomes an organizational liability. Both when it is taken and when it isn’t.

We all know what one week off will cost: the work piles up, the team absorbs the strain, clients wait longer, decisions stall, and we return to a backlog that takes another week to dig out from. A week’s vacation can easily triple an already overwhelming job demand.

This is an unintended consequence of building an operating structure based on volunteerism: people doing what needs to be done, with whatever capacity is available, because the mission matters. As small organizations outgrew dining room tables, they professionalized to survive—adopting formal PTO policies and titles. But adopting that policy architecture didn't create the operational redundancy those policies assume. The sector added standard employment benefits without funding the infrastructure that makes them usable.

We offer vacations as if the organization can release people from work.

But we staff the organization as if no one can really be gone.

The value of time away is not in question. Even the industrialists figured out that time off helped people perform at optimum capacity.

But the standard everyone’s being sold today is "a time away without consequence" or the space to "unplug completely" and "truly disconnect." Merriam-Webster defines vacation as “a period of exemption from work.” Nothing in that definition promises there won’t be consequences for your time away.

In the nonprofit landscape, the ethical bind of reaching this unattainable goal is the undercurrent of every vacation planning staff meeting.

The only job where I ever took a vacation without consequence to the organization was waitressing. The consequence to me was a week without income.

Vacation works best in roles where the work is designed to be coverable. That can mean interchangeable shifts, but it can also mean documented systems, shared authority, manageable workloads, and actual backup. Many nonprofit roles run instead on person-dependent knowledge, relationships, and informal authority. This is part of the problem: we are often a poor replacement for each other.

The How:

What it looks like in the room

Every few months, vacation goes back on the staff meeting agenda. Who’s taking what, when. Let's coordinate so there's coverage — no one can be gone at the same time.

Staff are being asked to balance a need to rest with the very real understanding that mission-driven work — work that often translates directly into meeting the basic needs of people they have direct relationships with — may slow down, thin out, or fall through the cracks while they're gone. This is why the push to take vacation can feel like a threat.

This fear is not abstract. It shows up in the moment when someone is actually out. When our DV advocate went on vacation, there was no backup plan for getting one of her clients to the methadone clinic. I drove her myself as the Director of Residential Programs.

• Some fight: “I can’t take time off, there’s too much going on in the next few months.”

• Some flight: disengaging quietly, taking sick days instead, checking out rather than planning an actual vacation.

• Some freeze: “I should take some time, I’ll get back to you about dates.”

• Some fawn: The outside voice says, “It’s fine, I don’t really need time off, I know everyone’s busy.” The inside voice says, “I don’t want to create a burden I’ll have to pay for later.”

But not everyone is responding to the same threat.

For one person, the issue may be clarity: “No one else fully understands my work, so I don’t trust that problems will be handled while I’m gone.”

For another, it may be respect: “I don’t want to hand my responsibilities upward to someone already overloaded.”

For another, belonging: “I don’t want my coworkers to resent me for leaving them with more.”

For another, agency: “I don’t want a policy forcing me to use time in a way that ignores my actual workload.”

For another, fairness: “Work distribution is already lopsided. It doesn’t feel fair to leave more work for the person who is already holding everything.”

Staff running this subconscious calculation probably desperately want a vacation. They also want to know everything won’t fall apart while they are gone.

That's the nuance. An "I'll get back to you with dates" could be driven by five different motivations across five different people — and often, not even the person saying it has the time to slow down and figure out which one it was.

The Why:

The overhead problem

Funders and boards have spent decades treating overhead as the enemy. Staffing capacity, backup coverage, supervision, cross-training, transition time, operational slack — all of it gets labeled as inefficiency unless it can be tied directly to a program line.

But redundancy is what makes vacation possible. If only one person understands the grant report, that person can't fully step away. If only one case manager holds the client relationships, those clients wait. If only one program director carries the calendar, the compliance requirements, the funder relationships, and the informal history of every decision, that role was never designed to pause.

A PTO policy says: you're allowed to be gone. The staffing model says: your absence causes strain.

Redundancy, by definition, is waste. It’s capacity sitting unused until the moment it’s needed — and it’s exactly what gets cut when a budget is built to minimize overhead.

Vacation, time off without consequence, is “how are you practicing self-care?” at the organizational level. We know it is a necessary part of doing good work, and it is offered without the structural conditions that would make it possible.

That's the double bind. The point of resistance behind every "you have five weeks of vacation" conversation. Take the time, and something you care about absorbs the cost. Don't take it, and you absorb the cost.

Share

The government thinks I can afford $400 a month in student loan payments while I play whack-a-mole with shutoff notices.

I have a master’s degree, twenty years of experience, and a resume that includes foster care, crisis services, and domestic violence shelters. I have managed teams, written grants, built programs from nothing, and held more organizational trauma than most people will encounter in a lifetime.

And I am broke. Professionally stuck. And still kinda convinced it is my fault.

I’m willing to believe it isn’t.

And if you’re reading this from inside a small nonprofit, wondering why your career feels like it stalled somewhere around year eight and never recovered — it isn’t your fault either.

It’s actually the result of a pretty financially efficient system.

The Hershey’s Kiss

We were promised job opportunities—a constant demand for our skills.

Every spring, tens of thousands of people receive graduate degrees in fields designed to serve the public good: social work, public health, divinity, education, counseling. Sometimes the degree results in a pay raise in a current field. Sometimes it is the price of entry into larger nonprofit systems like hospitals, universities, or public education. Sometimes it is just a nice-to-have.

But it is definitely not a guarantee you'll earn enough to pay back those student loans.

Here’s why:

The nonprofit sector is shaped like a Hershey's Kiss—wide at the bottom and then, somewhere in the middle, the shape starts to narrow. Fast.

Most nonprofit jobs are in big institutions: hospital networks, universities, schools, and other large systems with round-the-clock staffing needs. Nurses, administrators, professors, admissions staff, orderlies, housekeeping, security, direct care, food service. Many of these jobs do not require a graduate degree. There is almost constant turnover. This is where many nonprofit job “opportunities” actually live: in the churn.

But the nonprofits I have spent my professional life working in — the shelters, food banks, youth centers, crisis lines, advocacy organizations, and community programs — are a different ecosystem entirely.

They are small. Underfunded. Often volunteer-dependent. Some do not have paid staff at all.

The ones that do hire people operate on a shoestring. Their funding is deliberately light on infrastructure, designed to ensure money flows directly to the people being served rather than to the organization serving them.

That sounds noble.

It also has consequences.

The org chart in many of these organizations looks like this: one executive director who is not leaving, one middle manager wrangling the chaos, and a handful of entry-level staff, volunteers, and interns.

And that middle manager seat might as well be quicksand.

It is a minor miracle when you can move up in your current organization. When you look for a lateral move, you are not browsing a wide market. You are looking for an organization that happens to have a budget just big enough to have that one middle seat, and that seat has to happen to be vacant. Right now.

And the pay has to be survivable.

And the commute has to work.

An organization of this size may be just big enough to hire you. It is structurally unable to promote you. There is no higher tier. There is no further.

These organizations aren't designed to grow.

They're designed to survive.

The consequence of that design is both stagnation and churn. The founder stays. Everyone else eventually leaves, seeking opportunity, professional growth, and enough money to stop panicking every time the mail comes.

Sometimes it feels like being a contestant on The Amazing Race: constantly moving, mastering random skills, sprinting to the next challenge, exhausted and experienced and somehow no further ahead.

And still at risk of being eliminated at any point, regardless of prior performance.

Who the System Actually Works For

The system works for everyone but the middle manager.

The Executive Director isn’t stuck. They hold the top role available inside the organization. The organization exists around their vision and their relationships. This is their work, their identity, their second act, or all three.

The second-career person isn’t stuck. They came in after twenty years somewhere else. The salary is fine relative to what they already built. The ceiling doesn’t sting because they already advanced. They’re giving back, not building toward something.

The new graduate isn’t stuck. They’re here for two years, getting experience, and everyone knows it. This is a resume line. They’ll be gone before a promotion is even a question.

The funder likes it because it’s lean.

The clients get their services.

The person it suffocates is the mid-career professional.

The person who joined because the mission was real and the opportunity to learn and grow looked genuine. The person who stayed long enough to become competent, useful, and difficult to replace. The person who needs the organization to become something bigger, clearer, better resourced, and more stable.

This person is the only person in the building who needs the organization to grow.

And it can’t.

Or it won’t.

Pick the day.

Maybe ask the board.

Share

The Illusion of the Exits

So we look for the door.

Consulting looks like freedom. And for some people it is. But the market is crowded, income is uneven, and the people most likely to build successful consulting practices are the ones who were already better resourced—stronger networks, more visible platforms, and a financial cushion to absorb the slow months.

Not necessarily those of us still playing whack-a-mole.

Private practice looks like another option for those who maintained clinical licensure. But unless we keep a client or two on the side throughout our careers, the reality of building a meaningful clinical practice gets further and further out of reach. The license may still technically be ours. But using it requires a different kind of investment: time, money, supervision, insurance panels, risk tolerance, and evenings we may not have.

Other sectors look possible until we start applying.

The $65,000 nonprofit director role does not neatly translate into a $120,000 corporate management position, even when the actual competencies are equivalent or better. We are overqualified for entry level and underrecognized for senior leadership. The door exists, technically, if we are very good at a strengths-based sales pitch and can persuade someone to understand our experience in a language they already value.

So then we hold our breath and reenter the churn.

We find another organization, slightly larger maybe, with a slightly better title, and we start the clock again.

Waiting to find out where this ceiling is.

A Dose of Validation

I’m not going to end this with five steps.

There aren’t five steps.

I tell my interns, “The key to being a good helper is validate, validate, validate.”

People need to be seen. They don’t need their problems solved—but they do need to know that their problems are real.

This is real.

This is a problem for some of us, but not for the sector as a whole. The sector survives on this. In many ways, this model works exactly as designed.

It works because people absorb the instability.

It works because people call chronic underinvestment “mission.”

It works because people confuse being needed with having a future.

What I can offer is validation: the terrain is what it is.

You are not imagining it.

You are not failing.

You are not crazy.

And yes, you may actually be stuck.

The lack of opportunity is real. The exits are available, but imperfect. They are worth thinking about clearly rather than reactively.

So we stay and make the best of it. Or we leave and rebuild. Or we consult on the side. Or we keep a client or two. Or we take the training gig. Or we spend a few more years becoming wildly competent in a system that still cannot hold us.

And we get very, very good at whack-a-mole.

Subscribe now

P.S. I created a free Steadywork Structure Check for nonprofit and public sector leaders who are trying to make sense of burnout, conflict, confusion, or constant reactivity inside their organizations.

It takes just a few minutes, and you’ll receive a result that helps you see whether the issue may be rooted in structure, capacity, or safety to speak up.

Take the free Structure Check

Sources & Further Reading

• Budget distributions and national sector sizing via the National Council of Nonprofits’ Nonprofit Impact Matters national report.

• National nonprofit scope, operational asset analytics, and public data tracking via the Independent Sector and the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS).

Standing in the doorway of a shelter room as the guest screamed at me, “Is this what you want?” She wrenched her robe from her body and gave me a full frontal flash.

That is a moment I regret. It never should have happened. I don’t know what I was thinking.

I do know my train of thought. There had been a series of reports of guests keeping “contraband” of various sorts in their rooms, and I decided that unannounced room checks would be a good idea.

I did everything wrong.

Unannounced

Doing it alone

Did I mention unannounced?

I violated her boundary. She was just trying to enjoy a moment alone while her kids were in school. And I just knocked (at least I knocked) and walked in. So she violated mine.

Ironically, hers was not a room that I expected to find anything in—it was just the one next over from the office. First door on the right.

And then I was back at my desk, thinking, Did that really just happen? Like WTAF?

Never will I ever do room checks again—I don’t care if it’s my job.

I text my supervisor.

“What’s up?” she responds.

You will not believe what just happened. I so messed up..

Subscribe now

The Anatomy of the Social Contract

The social contract is the invisible agreement that lets people share space without constantly fearing humiliation, exposure, abandonment, or attack. It is especially important with strangers, especially strangers inside unequal power dynamics. It’s why my mom always told me to “be on your best behavior” when I went anywhere outside the house.

Direct service work exposes us to unpredictable social contract violations all the time. It also requires us to break the social contract ourselves: to interrupt, enter, redirect, refuse, remove, report, restrain, or say no in moments when the room depends on us to hold the line.

Sometimes the client breaks it with us, and we have no sanctioned response.

The person who will not let the meeting end, who will not take the hint, who keeps talking because we are the only person who has listened to them today.

The crisis line caller who turns the call into sexual violation, using our trained compliance — our professional obligation to stay on the line — as the mechanism of harm.

Our hesitation isn't weakness. It's being weaponized.

We cannot match it. We cannot name it in the moment. We absorb it and keep going, because the job requires it and because there is nowhere else for it to go.

Sometimes we are the one who has to break the contract.

We cut off the client in a group. Mid-sentence. Mid-disclosure. In front of everyone. Their trauma dumping is flooding the room, threatening to retraumatize everyone in it. Everyone is waiting for us to set the limit. So we do.

It feels awkward and clumsy.

We do it anyway.

I was in a crowded food bank lobby — fifty people watching — when a volunteer reached out for a new immigrant’s baby. The volunteer just wanted to hold the baby. The mother, who didn’t speak English, thought the volunteer was going to take her child forever.

I crossed the room in three steps. Stepped between the volunteer — a donor and my elder — and the mother.

“You are not going to hold that child.”

Publicly embarrassing a volunteer to protect a guest. That is a forced error in service of the room.

And then there are the unforced errors.

The woman in the shelter who was enraged that someone (me) just walked into the only private space she had without warning or consent. She was living in a domestic violence shelter. Her entire life had already been a series of social contract violations. Her room wasn’t even the one I was worried about. I searched it to make the process look routine. I added one more breach to a life already full of them — for the optics of the intervention.

We carry the person we had to cut off home with us. We lie awake wondering if we did it right, if we were too abrupt, if the person is okay.

Sometimes, we lie awake knowing we caused harm.

What Happens When Nobody Shows Up

We dance on the edge of inclusion and exclusion as a baseline condition of this work. Breaking the social contract—even when it is our job—can destabilize a nervous system that understands disconnection as danger.

When those breaches go unprocessed—without structure for reconnection—they accumulate. One breach alone might be metabolizable. But breach after breach, absorbed alone, dismissed as “the work,” with no opportunity for the worker to signal safety back to their nervous system?

That manifests as behaviors that can be misread as “performance problems”:

• The Hesitation: Avoiding the room, the task, or the call.

• The Withdrawal: Finding reasons to miss shifts or “checking out” mentally.

• The Hypervigilance: Startling at small things, over-explaining every decision, or laboring over ordinary tasks.

This is how organizational trauma manifests in direct service work. Rarely a dramatic breakdown. More often, it is the boiled frog: one more breach, then one more, then you realize the worker has already decided to leave.

Designed Availability

Reconnection looks like this: when someone picks up.

When a supervisor responds to a text instead of waiting until the next meeting. When a peer says, “I’ve got you.” When leadership shows up and says, “That was hard. You did what the job required. You’re still part of this team.”

That is the intervention. That moment proves the social contract still exists. That someone will show up. That the worker is not alone and will not be cast out for what the job required them to do.

The problem is that most organizations treat this as a nice-to-have. A bonus. Something that happens if the supervisor has time, if they notice, if they care enough.

It isn’t.

Reconnection after breach is not heroic availability. It is designed availability—built into the structure, expected, routine, non-negotiable.

It means:

• Supervisors have time in their schedule for this (not squeezed into overbooked calendars)

• The expectation is explicit (you will hear from your supervisor after difficult moments, not never)

• It happens predictably (after a restraint, after a hard boundary, after absorbing a violation)

• There is no condition attached (you don’t have to “earn” the reconnection by first proving you handled it well)

When leadership structures this in, workers’ nervous systems get the signal: the danger has passed, you are still safe in this group, and you will not be abandoned for doing the work.

Without it, you get what you get now: workers absorbing breach after breach alone, accumulating unprocessed exposure, their nervous systems making the decision for them.

They stop showing up. Or worse, they show up but are somewhere else entirely.

P.S. I created a free Steadywork Structure Check for nonprofit and public sector leaders who are trying to make sense of burnout, conflict, confusion, or constant reactivity inside their organizations.

It takes just a few minutes, and you’ll receive a result that helps you see whether the issue may be rooted in structure, capacity, or safety to speak up.

Take the free Structure Check

Yesterday I finished my greenhouse. For the fifth time.

I bought it for my husband last fall - when I was young and full of hope - wanting to extend the growing season in Maine. It’s a simple kit — aluminum frames, plastic sheeting for the walls, quarter-inch nuts and bolts. Three materials. The internet comments said it should take two days with two people.

It took two days the first time. My husband was excited about the project and helped me out. And then the first windstorm took it apart in about twenty minutes.

I live on a sloped lot with lots of rocks. There is no flat ground. And I am constitutionally impatient (or you could say “confident in my problem-solving skills in crisis”) — I skip over the boring prep work and just go for it. What would become build number one started right there where the driveway meets the lawn. I planned to move it down the hill to its final resting place later.

Classic Heather — I also never have the right tools. I lost the original wrench — which was inadequate anyway — and ended up working through a bag of leftover wrenches from other projects. None of them fit exactly. The ones that came close couldn’t get the right angle. I spent a lot of time almost making it work. My daughter got very good at playing doctor on my banged-up knuckles.

Not being an engineer, I did not appreciate quite how much a level working surface impacts the outcome of a structure. By the time I got to the roof there were two-inch gaps I couldn’t close. I’d push on one corner and something on the exact opposite side of the structure would pop out of alignment. Things weren’t meeting in time or space. So I duct taped it. All of it.

Then we moved it—more stuff popped out of place. My husband and I argued about the platform. We set it on three semi-even pallets, and I wanted to fill them in with sand — I was worried the open air underneath would freeze the plants, defeating the whole purpose. He wasn’t interested and was moving the plants in while I was still re-taping the roof.

We have a beautiful picture of my five-year-old daughter standing in the doorway surrounded by the plants and the evening summer light.

That night, a thunderstorm blew through. Pieces of the greenhouse were strewn down the wooded, poison ivy–infested embankment behind the house. The frame twisted over the battered herbs.

I rebuilt it then—in cold November winds—digging nuts and bolts out of the freezing sand.

A late December storm decimated it. Literally flattened. Two feet of beautiful snow covered it until April.

This week - armed with all the tape I scrounged in the house: teal duck tape, blue painters tape, electrical tape, scotch tape. And my bag of random wrenches. And my fierce determination. I put that thing back together. Build number five.

So it stands now—still on an uneven layer of pallets, duct taped to high hell, the base screwed into random boards I found laying around in the yard. A testament to my strength of will, determination, grit, and inability to ask for help.

It’s a hot mess.

Stabilize before optimize.

I’m a lousy builder. No patience, no spatial awareness, wrong tools, and too proud to ask for help. That combination produces exactly one outcome: collapse.

But I’m really good at seeing patterns across wildly different scenarios.

If you’re constantly patching the organizational equivalent of gaping holes in the roof and twisted metal—before you duct tape anything else, do as I say and not as I do.

Level the foundation.

If this pattern is showing up inside your organization — burnout that keeps returning, conflict that does not resolve, role confusion, staff withdrawal, turnover, or a sense that the same problems keep coming back under different names — it may be time to look at the conditions producing them.

Through Steadywork Partners, I help nonprofit and public-sector leaders diagnose the organizational conditions driving recurring strain and translate those findings into a practical Culture Repair Roadmap.

You can learn more about working with me here: Culture Repair Roadmaps

Last Saturday I spent four hours on Zoom exploring healing and trauma with a group of fellow practitioners.

I almost didn’t join. I’d stayed up late the night before helping my older son with a portfolio project, and I was currently fighting through a migraine while my five-year-old repeatedly asked, “Are you done yet?” - You know, life.

I powered through because the seminar was genuinely energizing—the kind of thoughtful conversation that reminds you why you stay in “The Work.” Tai chi moves and Qi gong theory intermingled with stories of refugees in Uganda and child soldiers in Cambodia. People shared how nontraditional healing techniques worked effectively with traumatized populations.

And then, we moved to the requisite section on self-care and a 30-year-old checklist from Transforming the Pain: A Workbook on Vicarious Traumatization.

Six domains. Rank yourself from 1 to 5. 5 = Frequently. 1 = It never occurred to me.

Hey, no shade on self-care—we all know it’s vital to staying in the work. And I’ve been working on my “work-life balance” for years—so I scored a 51 out of 55 in Workplace and Professional Self-Care. Winner!

I also scored highest in Spiritual Self-Care (all those astrology podcasts paying off) and lowest in Emotional Self-Care (yeah … and … I got nothing … do as I say, not as I do).

Then a participant zooming in from Northern Ireland said, rather pointedly, “Isn’t this just a western, white, colonized way to measure and codify life in order to create competition?”

A pause. And twenty other people from across the globe agreed.

In our breakout session, my new friend from Northern Ireland reflected back to me, “No wonder you are exhausted. You are carrying so much. I’m impressed you showed up today. I’m glad you did.” I teared up and was a little shocked that other people weren’t bringing so much complexity of life into the space.

Boiled frog was I.

“Just keep swimming” was my mantra.

If. I. Just. Keep. Showing. Up.

Someday it will get easier.

Subscribe now

Work and Life

The oldest root of the word “work” — werǵ- — means “to make.” The doing and the result, inseparable. The same root produces Greek orgḗ: natural disposition, impulse, the agitation of the soul.

The making-force and the passion-force came from the same word. Work and the drive to work were not yet distinct.

“Life” was less animated. Old English lif means simply to persist. Not dead yet. Life was the condition in which making was possible.

Work held the animation. Life was what remained.

Until the clock.

Clock Time

My son is practicing reading time right now. “Mom what time is it?” I look at the analog clock and say “5 am” - he looks at the digital clock and corrects me: “no, it’s 4:57.” So it is, go back to sleep, please! “What time can we get up?” “6:30” “Why?” “Because you have to get on the school bus at 7.”

Everything we now call work-life balance is the residue of contract negotiations. The workday — Robert Owen, 1817, a desperate attempt to stop the factories from consuming the workforce entirely. The weekend — a strategy to ensure workers showed up sober on Monday. Henry Ford’s two-day weekend — give workers time to consume what they create. The five-day workweek — Congress, 1932, a Depression-era jobs strategy.

Every limit on bounded work time was wrestled away from the factory owner. Then it resurfaced as a human resources strategy.

Subscribe now

Institutionalizing Work-Life Balance

The earliest recorded use of “work-life balance” in print was November 10, 1986. Tom Brown in Industry Week described managers struggling to capture what he called “a mythical thing called balance.” His audience was male executives in corner offices. His message: go home, your workaholism is killing our bottom line.

The very first use of the phrase called it “mythical.” Thirty-eight years of self-help content later, we’re still measuring ourselves against something its inventor didn’t think was real.

Through the 1970s and 80s, women entered a workplace designed around the assumption of a wife at home. What the Women’s Liberation Movement had been demanding was structural—equal pay, childcare, and institutional accommodation. They weren’t asking for balance; they were asking for equity.

The sector responded with feel-good supports designed to increase the worker’s tolerance for an intolerable system. “Work-Life Balance” turned into soft supports in lieu of contract negotiations.

Equal pay became casual Friday.

Dissolving Work-Life Balance

Meanwhile, in 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email, a side project he’d been told not to pursue on company time. With that one act, the walls separating work and life started to crumble.

By 1997, “Work” became a vibration in your pocket, and the phrase “work-life balance” exploded in the mainstream — a tenfold increase in newspaper coverage in four years. The physical separation that the concept required was disintegrating.

When COVID arrived, Google searches for work-life balance grew 40%.

But people weren’t searching for tips or strategies. They were searching for definitions.

What is work-life balance? When the workplace took over the home entirely, the idea of two separable territories requiring better ratio management revealed itself as the fiction it always was.

It has since been rebranded as “work-life integration,” “work-life harmony,” and a dozen other variations — each one a different attempt to capture something that never really existed.

Today, 73% of workers cite “work-life balance” as their top priority when looking for a new job. We are collectively chasing a standard that almost nobody can define because there is no longer a workplace to contain that definition.

Nobody can define it. But I know it when I see it on the LinkedIn post.

Relational Work-Life Balance

The corporate world exported this timesheet logic to the nonprofit sector, colonizing the hospital ward and the social work office under the assumption that relationship-based work could be managed like a spreadsheet.

It can’t.

When work is relational, applying a clock-time framework is like measuring distance with a thermometer. It is the wrong instrument. And you risk undermining the work itself.

In relational work, we speak of “The Work”—a phrase that refuses separation from life. We don’t ‘go to’ The Work; we carry it.

“The Work” is a responsibility, a craft honed over years, a practice without a product — none of which can be contained by a punch clock or ever truly be ‘done.’

When your work is a relationship, it shows up when your client is behind you in the pharmacy checkout line or when you spot your therapist across a crowded tapas bar. (Yeah, it happened. I can’t remember her name - but I remember that night at the tapas bar.)

Neither of you is within the confines of the “50-minute hour,” yet the connection remains.

When you try to “balance” a relationship by putting it in a box—pretending you don’t know your neighbor or your client on your “day off”—you don’t just fail at work-life balance. You damage the relationship - the core of the work.

A social worker thinking about a client at 9:00 PM is practicing her craft. Integration isn’t the problem—it’s a requirement.

Without it, we treat clients like widgets and ourselves like cogs.

Work and life don’t need to balance on a seesaw any more than a fish needs a bicycle.

My work is not a thief of my life — it is a manifestation of it.

When I finally close the laptop and look at my son, I’m not finding balance. I am not “leaving” my work to “enter” my life. I am simply bringing my presence back to another part of my life.

He has no concept of time. Done in 5 minutes might as well be done in 5 hours. When he asks if I’m done, he is asking when I can be present for him so we can do a crafting project, or jump on the trampoline, or make experiments—all those times when time disappears into the doing.

Share Beyond Team Building

References & Further Reading

The History of Work & Industrialization

• Owen, R. (1817). Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System. (For the “Eight hours’ labour, eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest” movement).

• Thompson, E. P. (1967). “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present, No. 38, pp. 56-97. (This is the definitive text on how task-time was replaced by clock-time.)

• Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. (Excellent context for the Enclosure Acts and the commodification of labor).

• Taylor, F. W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. Harper & Brothers. (The origin of “Taylorism” and the “widget” mindset).

The “Work-Life Balance” Concept

• Brown, T. (1986). “Time to diversify your ‘life portfolio’?” Industry Week, November 10, 1986. (Cited as one of the first mainstream uses of the term in a corporate context).

• Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press. (The popularization of personal “management” of life roles).

• Hochschild, A. R. (1997). The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. Metropolitan Books.

• Kickresume/WorldatWork (2024). Cited in WorldatWork, “Work-Life Balance: Is the American Model Getting a Bad Reputation?” worldatwork.org, June 2025.

The Relational & Structural Argument

• Saakvitne, K. W., & Pearlman, L. A. (1996). Transforming the Pain: A Workbook on Vicarious Traumatization. W.W. Norton & Company. (The workbook used in the vicarious traumatization training described in this essay.).

Etymology & Philosophy

• Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press. (Essential for the distinction between Labor and Work/Action).

• Online Etymology Dictionary (Douglas Harper). Entries for: Work (werg-)

Dateline: Inner-city Massachusetts, 2008.

I am in the staff meeting no program manager wants to be in. Senior management is there, too. I am explaining to my staff that at any time in the next week or so, they may get laid off.

Cuts to the state government are looking imminent, focusing on the Department of Health and Human Services, which funds our program directly. The directors of the state program — we are one of 15 sites running direct services through four-year cycles of competitive grants — have strategically routed our funding through a line item in the Early Childhood Education budget, which is less likely to get cut than wider HHS.

But we don’t know—and if the axe falls, the cuts will be immediate.

No money next month means no jobs next month. Our organization is working to find other funding and may be able to move some people into other programs.

The rest will be laid off. We are not sure who yet.

This organization had been around for 20 years at the time. Truly grassroots — started from a storefront on the block over, now occupying half a block, providing a safe space to hundreds of gang- and court-involved youth. Always progressive and on the cutting edge, we hired those youth into our programs. Half the staff I was looking at grew up here, got their first jobs here, were former teen parents themselves, and were making just enough to stay off food stamps.

When funding is cut, the final grant report reflects the dying breaths of the program — and its legacy. Final numbers served — better than expected. Best outcomes possible. Leaving the door open for potential funding in the future.

The reality: 150 clients lost services. And 10 staff went back on food stamps; fingers crossed they could re-up their Section 8.

Subscribe now

The Grassroots Baseline

Ninety-two percent of nonprofits in the US are grassroots community organizations — like shelters, youth centers, food pantries, and community mental health programs. Funding cuts in the big hospitals and universities might trigger a board-level budget review—but in these organizations, they trigger layoff notices—sometimes with the ED floating the last payroll herself.

The Invisible Subsidy: Postwar Volunteer Labor

The nonprofit sector was not built with paid workers in mind. Nonprofit budgeting was designed around postwar volunteer labor — predominantly Boomer and Silent Generation women who came from households with enough economic cushion to make 'giving back' affordable. They could do meaningful work and ask for little in return. The money tracked directly from donor to client. Volunteers absorbed the lack of infrastructure and supplies. Funding came in two forms: financial for direct services and “in-kind” for administration.

That “in-kind” administrative workforce has left the building.

They left starting in the 70s when divorce rates hit an all-time high. With a judge’s decree, homemakers became single mothers overnight. The household cushion that had subsidized nonprofit volunteer labor disappeared. More women entered the paid labor market because they had to.

The Vanishing Workforce

Every quarter when we Gen X managers are looking at our empty program coverage schedule, we ask ourselves, "Why can’t we find enough volunteers?” We have to work ourselves back through the history to remember — oh yeah. They don’t exist anymore. They went to work. So we pivot — and start lingering at Dunkin’ Donuts and haunting library quilting meetings to recruit the new retirees who still have the energy to work a full day.

Meanwhile, a different workforce was entering through a different door. Schools of Social Work actively recruited BIPOC students from the Millennial generation — many of whom came to the profession because someone had shown up for them when they needed it. They wanted to help their communities and were told that professional education was the price of entry — and most are still paying it.

Twenty years later, many are still paying $400 a month on a $40,000 education, trapped in a field that refuses to compensate for the credentials it demands.

The workforce professionalized. The funding model did not.

The Cost of doing God’s Work

Overhead — that is, paying a living wage — is consistently associated with waste in the nonprofit sector. Because it was a waste back in the day, when volunteers could donate their time and be compensated in reminders that they were doing “God’s work.”

Doing God’s work takes a financial toll:

• The Wage Gap: Nonprofit staff earn 30% to 37% less than workers doing comparable work in other sectors.

• The Financial Strain: One in five nonprofit employees lives in a household experiencing active financial hardship.

• The Retention Crisis: Two-thirds of nonprofit workers surveyed reported they are actively looking for new jobs—or will be within the year—due to unsustainable workloads and inadequate pay.

Which brings us to 2026, three generations after the volunteers left. The financial feedback loop never adapted. Funders still reward lean budgets, and the sector keeps building them. But the volunteers doing “God’s work”—the ones who used to absorb the administrative costs—have long since evaporated.

In their place, the sector now depends on employing a professional workforce on suppressed salaries—keeping the very people who provide the services just one or two paychecks away from needing them.

Indoor plumbing is God’s work. Helping is human work, and humans need compensation to meet basic needs. Society doesn't expect the average person to walk down Mass and Cass to engage with a crisis firsthand—we depend on trained professionals to intervene. But society should expect that the professionals who do can afford their own rent—so they can focus on human lives instead of wasting time comparing the pros and cons of tents over tarps.

Yes, when funding is cut, clients lose services.

And a worker doesn’t just lose a job.

She becomes a client.

P.S. I created a free Steadywork Structure Check for nonprofit and public sector leaders who are trying to make sense of burnout, conflict, confusion, or constant reactivity inside their organizations.

It takes just a few minutes, and you’ll receive a result that helps you see whether the issue may be rooted in structure, capacity, or safety to speak up.

Take the free Structure Check

Sources & Further Reading

92% of nonprofits in the US operate on budgets under $1 million annually. Nonprofit Impact Matters, National Council of Nonprofits. https://www.nonprofitimpactmatters.org/data/downloadable-charts/

Nonprofit human services workers earn 30–37% less than workers in comparable non-care industries. Wage Equity for Non-Profit Human Services Workers, University of Washington School of Social Work. https://socialwork.uw.edu/wp-content/uploads/WageEquityStudy_Summary_0_0.pdf

22% of nonprofit workers live in households unable to afford basic necessities. ALICE in the Nonprofit Workforce: A Study of Financial Hardship, Independent Sector and United For ALICE, September 2024.https://independentsector.org/blog/research-finds-22-of-nonprofit-workers-experience-financial-hardship/

Two-thirds of nonprofit employees reported in 2024 that they were looking for new jobs or would be within a year. Top reasons: too much work with too little support (59%) and inadequate pay and benefits (50%). The People Behind Nonprofit Impact, Candid, 2024. https://candid.org/blogs/nonprofit-employees-survey-data-suggests-high-staff-turnover-ahead/

US divorce rates peaked in 1979 at 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women. Divorce Rate in the US: Geographic Variation, 2022, National Center for Family and Marriage Research, Bowling Green State University.https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/loo-divorce-rate-US-geographic-variation-2022-fp-23-24.html

It happens three times a year. I sit across from my interns on Zoom and we say nice things to each other. How much we’ve learned. How grateful we are.

Each time, I’m flattered and sort of saddened at how specific the gratitude gets. They tell me I was available, kind, considerate, and academically rigorous. They tell me they hope their next supervisor is like me.

I assure them they probably will be.

And I hope that will be true.

Last year, an intern was tearful as she reflected on how challenging the year had been — the work, the family demands, the internship that brings up your own wounds and forces the slow work of learning to stay present with other people’s pain. It resonated. I’ve been there — I cried in supervision, too.

I was overwhelmed in my first placement. I felt inadequate most of the time — they call it “imposter syndrome” now. That’s just supervision in year one, I was told. You learn by doing. Fake it until you make it. We can’t sit in session with you. But I also cried in supervision because of something my supervisor said to me, about me. I am not a crier. She told me crying in supervision was normal.

That kind of crying might be normal in her supervisions. Not in mine.

My interns cry because there’s enough safety in the room to feel what they’re feeling. I didn’t make them cry. The structure of the room made it possible.

My supervisor made me cry.

That is not the same thing.

Ten years later I was working alongside a second-year intern, and we discovered we’d both done our first-year placement with the same supervisor. She had made them cry, too.

Once is an anomaly. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern.

I am willing to bet there was a third.

Subscribe now

The Self-Care Trap: Don’t Cry, You’ll Rust Yourself Again

Twenty years out, no longer feeling like an imposter but more like a road-weary traveler, I scroll through LinkedIn and Substack and find the same story over and over. Front-line workers describing years of recovery from supervisors who made their lives impossible. Painful, specific, recognizable accounts from people who gave everything to this work and emerged as a shadow of their former selves. Imposter syndrome replaced with a sense of abject failure — reinforced by their coworkers, their supervisors, and the work environment itself.

I’ve written about it myself — Why Your Nonprofit Team Is Traumatized (And Calling It “Burnout”) — in a piece that earned 2,100 LinkedIn followers in two weeks.

I also found an entire industry perfectly willing to help. PDFs for $37 that teach you how to set limits and survive toxic bosses. Workshops on nervous system regulation for people in high-stress jobs. Top Five Self-Care Tips for the Sunday Night Scaries.

An entire industry of consultants has been built around helping our front-line workers endure conditions that do not need to exist.

So here’s why this bothers me.

When the solution targets the person instead of the conditions, it perpetuates the problem at their expense. It creates a renewable market, ready with new self-care techniques as each adaptation fails.

Teaching someone to survive a traumatizing environment is not help —It’s exploitation.

And we leaders are buying into the hope for change, too.

When we reach for a self-care solution instead of a structural one, we are not just failing to fix the problem. We are telling our staff that the conditions are acceptable — that’s just working in a nonprofit — and the deficit is individual. That if we all just regulated our nervous systems a little better, took more vacation, set firmer limits, turn off your phone, stop checking email on the weekends — everything would be fine and functional. And we are doing it with the best intentions and an evidence-based workshop — specially funded by a local grant.

The gaslighting is so deep that even the gaslighters believe it. The same pain that sells a $37 PDF to the worker sells a $5,000 workshop to the leader.

Frameworks for motivating disengaged staff. Trauma-informed management tools. Day-long workshops on how to lead through burnout. All evidence-based and perfectly reasonable — but aimed at the wrong level.

We want to believe the problem is in ourselves and our management deficits. Because if it’s us, it seems easier to fix. And as long as we believe that, nothing actually changes — we continue on the treadmill of management workshops and boundary trainings.

We are making our interns cry and assuring them that it is normal. And a whole field — often made up of former nonprofit leaders now rebranding as consultants — is probably finally making a living wage from teaching us how to tolerate it.

Subscribe now

The Root Cause: There’s No Crying in Baseball

I’ll admit the irony: I’m a nonprofit leader turning consultant — I, too, would love to make a living wage. And I have a theory — a potential cycle-ending solution — I’d like to share. You don’t have to buy anything. This is too important to keep behind a paywall.

There is a structure generating these conditions. And we have the power — and more importantly — the responsibility to fix it.

So here goes.

By its very nature, nonprofit work is an unstable environment. Any organization that cannot predict how it will keep the lights on next year is operating on shaky ground. That is a baseline condition outside our control.

Unstable environments generate predictable responses — silence, hypervigilance, walking on eggshells, decision paralysis, conflict that escalates out of proportion to its trigger. What might look like bad work habits, poor performance, or attitude problems are what nervous systems do when they cannot read or predict the environment they are working inside.

Those solutions — the virtual fire hose of frameworks and tools from people formerly in the trenches — they do work. But they work best when you stabilize the environment enough to sort out who is responding from stress and who genuinely doesn’t have the interpersonal skills for the job.

The 4 Pillars of Workplace Stability

Have you ever wanted to lose it after spending an hour looking in your Drive for the most up-to-date version of a grant that is due tomorrow only to realize that it was saved on the desktop of your co-worker who is on vacation this week? Like literally smash the computer into the wall? Maybe that’s just me.

I would be a lot less huffy on the phone with my coworker if we had both worked on the document from a mutually agreed upon place. I wouldn’t even have to bother them on their vacation. They would have been a lot less huffy too. And we may not have engaged in those uncomfortable passive-aggressive interactions for the next month before our supervisor brought us together for some relationship repair.

A common agreement on where documents are saved would have prevented all that.

The fix for overwhelming work environments is more accessible than we think.

Instead of diagnosing individuals, leaders need to focus on collective structural work. True workplace stability requires anchoring your organization across four core domains:

• Role Clarity: Is it crystal clear who owns which decisions?

• Operational Predictability: Can people predict what comes next, or is every day an organizational surprise?

• Emotional Containment: Does leadership absorb external volatility or pass it straight down to the front lines?

• Physical & Psychological Safety: Do caseloads and workflows reflect what human beings can actually realistically carry?

And these changes are in our control.

To be clear, this is no magic formula. Six months of consistent practice in these areas will not transform your organization. But it will stabilize it — and create an environment where good work becomes possible again. We all deserve that.

A stabilized team looks different from a traumatized one. Our people ask questions instead of going silent. Mistakes surface before they become crises. Conflict gets named in the room instead of triangulated around it. And we can finally see clearly: who was responding to an unstable environment, and who may genuinely not have the skills for the job.

Last night we held a group supervision and a goodbye for this semester’s interns. A continuing student asked them for advice.

They all said, down to the person: self-care.

Clearly, we have work to do.

Prescribe epsom baths and walking barefoot in the grass, or consistent meeting times with predictable agendas — it’s your choice.

P.S. I created a free Steadywork Structure Check for nonprofit and public sector leaders who are trying to make sense of burnout, conflict, confusion, or constant reactivity inside their organizations.

It takes just a few minutes, and you’ll receive a result that helps you see whether the issue may be rooted in structure, capacity, or safety to speak up.

Take the free Structure Check

I read this article about nonprofit worker well-being and tried to join the conversation. It’s for funders only. The nonprofit workers whose well-being is the subject of the entire conversation were not invited.

Philanthropy Doesn’t Cause Burnout — But It’s Part of the System Producing It. Published May 5th by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. Glossy. Serious. Well-resourced. I’ve read it fifteen times. I’m still confused.

A structural argument about nonprofit worker wellbeing. Completely in my lane. Someone speaking my language.

And no.

It took me two days of processing — like deep reading — to understand that it was not meant to come up on my LinkedIn feed. It was an article written by funders, for funders, about funders.

That probably explains why I was genuinely confused. I saw ‘burnout’ and ‘system’ and thought someone in the land of donors finally made the connection and wanted to start a genuine conversation.

Man, was I ever wrong.

Subscribe now

The piece opens with Pui Ling Tam, an executive director earning $80,000 in San Francisco in 2017 — a salary that still sat inside the brutal economics of that city. Raising her own salary felt indulgent. She was thinking about promotions for two staff members without meaningful raises. The piece calls this a sector failure:

“The sector to which they committed their professional lives was preparing to underpay them for it.”

But Pui Ling was the sector, inside that organization, in that moment. She was not outside the system. She was making decisions inside it. I’ve written about this before — The Nonprofit Vow of Poverty. Financial self-sacrifice as proof of mission commitment. It doesn’t make her the villain. It makes her a precise example of what the vow does to otherwise good leaders: it makes underpaying people feel like fiscal responsibility until it doesn’t anymore.

A fair salary matters. It is not nothing. But you can pay people adequately and still be working inside a structure that makes good work impossible. Poor worker well-being outcomes can also be attributed to lack of role clarity, minimal operational predictability, leadership that transmits every funder's anxiety directly to staff, and caseloads that are never named or capped. Salary is one variable. The operational structure is the day-to-day experience.

Pui Ling's reckoning was real. She saw she was trapping mission-aligned workers in the same economic precarity as the communities they serve. She took that insight to the funder side.

Where it turned into the same old grant with flexible methods and measurable outcomes.

The Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

“What Pui Ling named — the price of ignoring nonprofit worker well-being — is not abstract.”

Nothing is hiding. Any person in nonprofit will tell you they don’t make enough and funders are reluctant to fund overhead. Pui Ling Tam can tell you that. She just did.

Then they cite the research. The same research anyone who has spent time inside these systems already knows. The research is two years old.

Then the insight reframed as opportunity:

“Today, philanthropy has the opportunity to demonstrate more presence and share the responsibility for these conditions.”

Here’s how: Longer grants. Unrestricted funds. Leader well-being grants — resources organizations can use for “rest, professional support, team development, or healing.”

Now we have to write a quarterly report on the impact of our self-care.

It’s the nonprofit equivalent of a move-out fund for domestic violence survivors. Here’s money for your new apartment. We won’t tell you what to buy; we’ll make space for you to choose. But it’s for the apartment. Restricted to the apartment. Reported against the apartment.

Then they cite their outcomes data. Predictibly, wages went up, turnover dropped, and a four-day workweek held. Real outcomes. I do wonder how much staff time went into packaging that up for the end-of-year report. Just curious.

But no amount of box breathing will reduce the strain of role creep. Professional support doesn’t hold when leadership is in chaos. Team development is a waste of time when the team doesn’t know who owns what. Healing is impossible when the conditions producing the harm are still intact.

Self-care matters. Wages matter. AND they are not sufficient. Unpredictable funding is the ocean we’re swimming in. Structural instability is what pulls people under. No well-being self-care grant teaches you how to swim out of an invisible rip current. You might learn the dead man’s float, though.

“Funders Hold a Key Piece of the Solution.”

Actually, yes. They do. It’s called money.

Subscribe now

Worker well-being is not a philanthropic strategy. It’s an organizational one. Funders who make it their strategy are still in the room, still defining the terms, still requiring proof. The grant relationship is how funders experience the mission. That’s understandable. It’s also not neutral.

Every hour a leader spends reporting on staff well-being to a funder is an hour not spent building the structure that produces it.

If you’re a funder reading this — really think about why you feel the need to be in the room. Because underneath the language of partnership and trust and shared responsibility is usually a simpler assumption: we will misspend the money if you’re not watching.

That’s not trust-based philanthropy. That’s micromanagement.

The piece closes with this:

“Worker well-being belongs at the center of every philanthropic strategy.”

I’d like to propose a different sentence.

If it stays with funders, it just becomes another area to micromanage and an outcomes measure to point to. Instead of "How many clients did you serve?” it’s "How happy are your staff?" The grantee still has to prove something to someone holding a checkbook. And now if our staff aren’t demonstrably happier — if the well-being metrics don’t move — that’s a performance problem. We’ve failed the grant. Except now we’ve failed it personally. Our people’s suffering is the outcome measure.

Now the pressure is on employees to be happier while they serve more clients — deliverables from another grant.

And it gives funders a new reason to stay in the room — to feel all the good feels of helping others. To be the kind of funder who sees the whole person, not just the program.

That’s not innovation. It’s just another grant report.

The actual paradigm shift would be this: here’s unrestricted money; we trust you; goodbye.

And then — separately, independently, without a funder in the room — leaders have the time and space to do the structural work that actually changes the conditions. Unfortunately, taking a week to create an organized Google Drive does not make for compelling shared funder experiences. But it does make getting that grant report in on time much easier.

Please don’t ask us to package staff well-being into an outcome measure.

• Role clarity.

• Operational predictability.

• Emotional containment.

• Caseloads named and capped.

The conditions that make good work possible.

Philanthropic micromanagement is not needed.

P.S. I created a free Steadywork Structure Check for nonprofit and public sector leaders who are trying to make sense of burnout, conflict, confusion, or constant reactivity inside their organizations.

It takes just a few minutes, and you’ll receive a result that helps you see whether the issue may be rooted in structure, capacity, or safety to speak up.

Take the free Structure Check

Good people + impossible conditions = workplaces from hell.

What if your “culture problem” is actually a conditions problem?

Most leaders trying to drive change ask the wrong question:

How do I get my people to change?

The better question is:

Am I making change possible?

What we label as “culture issues” are usually the predictable result of unstable conditions. Fix the system, and the behavior follows.

Subscribe now

Pressure Reinforces. Structure Stabilizes.

Change is nearly impossible in high-stress environments. There’s a reason most transformation efforts stall: The harder you push, the tighter people hold on.

When you lead with pressure, you trigger the "Survival Feedback Loop":

• You communicate urgency → people shut down

• You mandate new behaviors → people perform compliance

• You explain the logic → nothing actually changes

• You track accountability → people get more cautious, not more open

From the outside, it looks like resistance.
From the inside, it feels like self-protection.

Your Logic Model Is Upside Down

Culture problems are not the cause of organizational chaos. Organizational chaos creates culture problems.

When pressure becomes the primary operating environment, people adapt to survive. What leadership experiences as “clarity” often lands on the front lines as threat. And threat triggers the biological survival response:

• Fight: Pushback and conflict.

• Flight: Disengagement and turnover.

• Freeze: Silence and indecision.

Your people may look difficult. They may even look impossible. But most of the time, they are simply giving a normal response to a highly stressed environment.

Change the Structure, Not the People

If an environment feels unpredictable, exposed, or inconsistent, people will naturally protect themselves.

But when the environment becomes clear, stable, and navigable, people begin to take risks. They begin to innovate. They begin to breathe.

It’s not flashy, but it works:

• Predictability: Consistent meeting schedules.

• Clarity: Written policies and procedures that are actually used.

• Boundaries: Clear expectations around roles and authority.

• Safety: Protocols that are followed, not just posted.

Good people. Impossible conditions. Fix the conditions.

Share

P.S. I created a free Steadywork Structure Check for nonprofit and public sector leaders who are trying to make sense of burnout, conflict, confusion, or constant reactivity inside their organizations.

It takes just a few minutes, and you’ll receive a result that helps you see whether the issue may be rooted in structure, capacity, or safety to speak up.

Take the free Structure Check

A few years ago while casually searching the want ads, I came across a job description that made me want to run for the hills. I’m going to use it as our working example. The organization doesn’t matter — this isn’t about them specifically.

The job description is where you have to translate the inner workings of your organization to the outside world.

Here’s how to read its.

Subscribe now

Step 1: Listen for the pitch.

Read the whole document and ask yourself honestly: does this sound like a job description or a sales pitch? If they’re selling the mission and the belonging, it’s probably because they can’t sell the job itself.

In our example, the opening paragraph read like this:

How would you like to be a change agent, working closely with our clients and community? Would you like to work in a place that seeks to hire folks whose lived experiences and identities are reflective of the vibrant and diverse communities that we serve? Join us in this rewarding work!

Then, buried in the middle of the document, after a page of duties:

We provide a supportive, collaborative work environment that focuses on the growth and development of its employees. We maintain solid practices and policies that uphold professional standards while affording healthy work-life balance.

The red flag isn’t the presence of passion, but the absence of clarity.

When recruitment language leads with emotion, trades on your identity as a helper, and emphasizes enthusiasm instead of scope, authority, and structure — the organization has made a strategic decision to recruit on ideals, because they probably cannot afford the skill set.

When they can’t describe the job, they describe the feeling of the job. That’s the tell.

A stable organization keeps both sections brief because the structure speaks for itself:

Step 2: Count the duties.

Does the list of responsibilities run longer than a page? Does “other duties as assigned” appear at the bottom like a catch-all for everything they couldn’t quite name?

In our example, one role was expected to hold:

• program management and compliance reporting,

• staff supervision including weekly one-on-ones and formal evaluations,

• direct client services,

• community partner and coalition representation,

• staff and community partner training, and

• fundraising and donor events.

That’s not a job description. That’s an organizational chart.

At the bottom: Additional duties may be assigned.

A duties list that runs long isn’t a sign of a robust role. It’s a sign that the organization has loaded everything it needs into one position and is hoping the right person will be enthusiastic enough to take it on.

“Other duties as assigned” is almost never neutral. It’s a placeholder for the work the organization knows exists but can’t fully account for yet — or doesn’t want to commit to on paper. A role with undefined edges can’t be operationally predictable. The person inside it can never know what a normal week looks like because normal was never articulated.

Count the bullets. More bullets — less organizational stability.

At ACME you would probably see:

Step 3: Look at what they’re requiring versus what their minimum qualifications are.

In our example, the role required supervising staff, managing complex community partnerships, providing crisis response, training, and fundraising.

Minimum qualifications: one year of experience in a related field.

That gap between what the role demands and what the qualifications reflect is a salary decision. They can’t afford the skill set, so they’re recruiting for enthusiasm instead.

The person who takes that job will spend their first year discovering the distance between their skill set - what they were hired for - and what the role actually requires. That distance has a cost. It lands on them — and eventually on the people they work with.

At ACME you would probably see:

Step 4: Are they posting the actual salary?

Our example did post a number: starting at $52,000.

This role included program management, compliance reporting, staff supervision, direct client services, crisis response coverage, staff training, and fundraising events across multiple service areas.

Does that number actually compensate for the skills required to do the job? Fifty-two thousand dollars for a role that functions as an entire leadership team is not a salary. It’s the same bet as the pitch and the duties list — that enthusiasm will fill the gap the budget can’t.

A salary that doesn’t match the scope of work creates two problems at once: the person hired may not be able to cover their basic needs, and the organization likely couldn’t afford the skill set the role actually demands.

When compensation doesn’t cover basic needs, financial instability becomes a condition of employment.

At ACME you would probably see:

Inherited job descriptions are a clue to your present organizational dysfunction.

If you are a new leader who has walked into an organization and you’re trying to understand why your long-term staff seem burned out, guarded, or resistant — find the job descriptions.

Not the current ones. The old ones. The ones that were posted for the roles your staff have been holding for years.

Read them the way I just taught you to read them.

These are tells, not verdicts. But patterns this consistent don’t usually lie.

The job description is the artifact of what trade-offs the organization has been making.

How many times has the organization made an aspirational hire? How many of those hires are still there — and now showing up as your ‘problem’ employees?

Some of what you find, you can fix. Role clarity, scope, predictability — those are structural repairs. But an organization that has spent years making aspirational hires has a budget so removed from reality that the repair isn’t restructuring. It’s reckoning.

P.S. I created a free Steadywork Structure Check for nonprofit and public sector leaders who are trying to make sense of burnout, conflict, confusion, or constant reactivity inside their organizations.

It takes just a few minutes, and you’ll receive a result that helps you see whether the issue may be rooted in structure, capacity, or safety to speak up.

Take the free Structure Check

Writing a job description is surprisingly hard.

You sit down with two or three people and ask what sounds like a simple question.

What is it we needed?

And sometimes it feels exactly like walking into the kitchen with a clear sense of purpose — and then standing there, utterly at a loss for what that purpose was. So you grab a cookie. If it was important, you’ll remember later.

The need was real. It’s still real. You just can’t quite locate it anymore.

The team was drowning. Not in any one thing — in everything. Scheduling. Documentation. Follow-up. The hundred small administrative tasks that don’t belong to any single role but have to belong to someone. They belonged to everyone, which meant they belonged to no one, which meant they belonged to whoever had five minutes and couldn’t pretend they didn’t see it.

So we wrote a grant for an administrative assistant.

The need felt clear when we wrote it. Someone to hold the administrative load so the clinical staff could do clinical work. Straightforward. Defensible. The kind of role that makes obvious sense on paper.

The funding came through. Now we had to write the job description.

And that’s where it got complicated.

Subscribe now

Because “administrative assistant” is a title.

What we actually needed was harder to name. We needed someone to absorb the accumulated overflow from a team that had been running without enough support for so long that nobody could say anymore what was clinical work and what was administrative. The lines had blurred. The work had redistributed itself among whoever was available. And now we were trying to write a clean job description for a role that was really just — everything we’d stopped being able to do.

How do you post that?

Seeking administrative assistant to hold what we’ve been dropping. Must be comfortable with ambiguity. Other duties as assigned.

That’s the thing about absorbing a vacancy over time. It doesn’t just add to your workload. It reorganizes your sense of what belongs to you. The work stops feeling like coverage. It starts feeling like responsibility. And responsibility, once it settles into your daily life, stops being temporary. It just becomes the thing you do before you can do your actual job — and then eventually it becomes your actual job, and you stop remembering that it wasn’t.

There’s another version of this that I have also experienced.

You post for one thing and hire for two. The candidate can do what the job description says — and also happens to have skills in something you desperately need. Grant writing. Data management. IT. Communications. So you hire them. The second role lives in “other duties as assigned” and surfaces a few weeks in, often through the new hire’s own eagerness to prove themselves — a skill mentioned in passing, a gap they notice and step into, a problem they solve once and are handed permanently.

It’s never meant as a permanent solution. That candidate had a stronger, broader resume. They can fill two gaps for the price of one — until we hire again, and that pull is hard to resist when you’ve been running short for years.

But the person who took that job didn’t negotiate for two roles. They negotiated for one. The second arrived without a title change, without a compensation conversation, without anyone formally deciding it was theirs. It transferred the way things transfer in underfunded organizations — through willingness, and then through assumption.

What makes this confusing is that none of it feels like exploitation while it’s happening. It feels like making it work. It feels like a team that rises to the occasion. And sometimes it genuinely is those things — people coming together to hold something important when the conditions aren’t what they should be.

This is how good people in mission-driven organizations wake up one day burnt out and angry. Acknowledging it would require admitting that the role was never actually scoped for one person to hold. The job description was aspirational — it described something the organization couldn’t quite afford.

The person who takes that job is walking into something that was already overwhelming before they arrived.

They didn’t create the overload.

They inherited it.

And if they’re conscientious — and most people drawn to this work are — they may not realize what happened until they’re deep enough in it that leaving feels harder than staying.

I keep thinking about that kitchen.

Walking in with a purpose and losing it somewhere between the doorway and the counter.

The cookie helps. But it doesn’t solve the initial problem.

The problem was real. The need was real. And somewhere in the wait — in the absorbing and the covering and the making it work — it got distributed across so many people that nobody could hold the whole shape of it anymore.

That’s still the job when you sit down to write the description. To name what you’re actually asking someone to walk into — not just what the grant covers, not just what the budget can hold, but what a person will actually find when they show up on the first day.

That’s harder than it sounds.

It’s also the most honest thing you can do before someone says yes.

If you recognized your organization in any of this, I made something for you.

Why Your ‘Personnel Problems’ Are System Problems is a free one-page guide that names five survival responses leaders misread as personnel issues — and what’s structurally generating each one.

Free Guide

P.S. I created a free Steadywork Structure Check for nonprofit and public sector leaders who are trying to make sense of burnout, conflict, confusion, or constant reactivity inside their organizations.

It takes just a few minutes, and you’ll receive a result that helps you see whether the issue may be rooted in structure, capacity, or safety to speak up.

Take the free Structure Check

I’ve written more job descriptions than I expected to. Somewhere underneath that surprise was an assumption I didn’t know I was carrying: that job structures should be relatively stable across organizations. The assumption was that a role should remain consistent across organizations.

It makes sense in other fields. If you’re building a house, the job descriptions are settled before you break ground. An electrician does electrical work. A framer frames. A plumber handles plumbing. The physics of the problem, not the contractor's budget, defines each role. You don’t ask the framer to handle rough plumbing because the plumbing budget is short.

Nonprofit work doesn’t have that anchor.

Most nonprofit organizations do not define roles based on the nature of the work. They’re scoped by the funding — which means every time a grant comes through, you’re not hiring for a defined position so much as assembling one from whatever the funder was willing to pay for. And what the funder was willing to pay for is rarely the full extent of what the work actually requires.

A program need exists. Leadership identifies funding to address it. The grant application describes the role as it should be staffed — with the depth of skill, the supervision structure, and the caseload limits that would actually allow the work to be done well. The application is competitive. The funder awards a portion of what was requested and expects the organization to find the rest.

The organization accepts. Some resources are better than none.

Now the job description has to be written for a role that was designed at full funding and will be staffed at sixty percent of it. Nothing has changed — except the salary.

But 60% of a competitive salary doesn’t buy 60% of the skill set. It buys whoever will accept 60% of a competitive salary.

Subscribe now

So you hire for potential instead of depth. Because potential is cheaper than depth. And the work still needs to get done.

Potential also requires investment — supervision, training, and time. These are the first things to go when an organization is already stretched.

When the grant lands and it’s time to post the position, there’s a temptation — and I want to name it as a temptation because it feels reasonable in the moment — to keep the job description loose. Vague about scope. Light on specifics. Heavy on flexibility language.

The reasoning is rational: funding is unpredictable, organizational needs shift, and a tightly written job description locks you into a role design that may not survive the next funding cycle. If you build in flexibility now, you protect yourself later.

The flexibility you’re protecting isn’t your ability to do the work well — or even get it done. It’s the capacity to expand the role later without additional compensation or a formal conversation about scope.

This isn’t malicious. It’s what chronic instability produces in the people trying to manage it. When you can’t predict what you’ll need in eighteen months, vagueness feels like prudence.

But the person who accepts that position experiences something different. They experience a role with no defined edges, expectations that expand without formal acknowledgment, and success criteria that shift with the funding landscape they have no visibility into and no control over. They do what people do in that situation: they adapt. They absorb. They try to hold everything.

And eventually they can’t.

The gap between how job descriptions are written and what candidates experience inside those roles isn’t meant as staff exploitation — but it functions as that. Most nonprofit leaders are trying to hold organizations together under conditions that make straightforward role design genuinely difficult.

But intent doesn’t change the structural outcome.

A job description written for flexibility is a job description written for overload. The vagueness that protects the organization transfers directly to the person hired into it — as ambiguity about scope, as an absence of authority, and as a workload that expands to fill whatever the organization needs.

The house analogy breaks down at the right point: when the framing budget is short, you don’t ask the electrician to do the framing. You can either build a smaller house, wait until you can fund it properly, or have an honest conversation with everyone involved about what’s possible with what you have.

Nonprofit organizations usually need to keep building larger houses. The need doesn’t shrink because the funding did. But there is still a difference between naming that constraint honestly and hiding it in the job description—and that difference is carried by the person you hire before they’ve worked a single day.

The job description is the first structural signal your organization sends. It shows candidates whether you can see your own conditions clearly enough to name them — or whether you obscure them.

How you write it predicts how you’ll lead. Same skill. Same honesty. Same capacity to face what’s actually true instead of papering over it.

If these patterns are showing up in your organization, the next question is not “What is wrong with our people?”
The better question is: “What conditions are making these responses necessary?”

Through Steadywork Partners, I help nonprofit and public-sector leaders identify the structural conditions driving burnout, conflict, withdrawal, over-compliance, and performance strain — and translate those findings into a practical Culture Repair Roadmap.

Learn more here: Work With Me: Culture Repair Roadmaps

2002 — The lawn of a local park.

2003 — The bus stop.

2007 — The walk to Dunkin’ Donuts.

2010 — The drive to Dunkin’ Donuts.

2012 — The supervision room, door closed.

2015 — Starbucks.

2018 — Covert texts during the meeting itself.

I’ve been taking the “debrief walk” my entire career. Different organizations. Different roles. Different colleagues.

Same conversation: Why do I work here? How do I get out? Can you believe what the boss did today?

For years I thought this was just what helping work felt like. Twenty years in the field, I can tell you that it is — and there is a reason why. And it’s fixable.

As I moved from frontline staff to “promoted-on-potential” manager to senior lead, I experienced it myself. Management training almost always lags behind responsibility. When you do “God’s Work” on unpredictable funding, cheaper labor is better.

Management relies on dedication and front-line overfunctioning to subsidize the lack of skill training.

Poor, Peter—Promoted to the Point of Incompetence

In nonprofits, people are promoted because they’re excellent at the work in their previous position — not because anyone taught them how to manage what comes next. Each promotion came with the hope that their talent would translate. Or a promise of “management training” that may or may not have materialized. Things move fast around here. We didn’t get the grant to fund the training.

Sometimes we got lucky, and the supervisor was great — mostly as the result of natural talent and sheer force of will. I think they call it “grit” these days.

But as responsibilities get more complex and stress moves into constant overwhelm — what seem like unhinged behaviors are actually predictable and diagnostic. Our fearless leader has moved beyond their coping skills into chronic trauma response territory:

Fight: One of my bosses shattered a glass in the office because she was so mad at us for not getting our data in right or on time.

Flight: One overnight shift in residential treatment, one of our charges ran away — despite her shoes being taken away. Texts, calls to our supervisor on call. No response.

Freeze: Meeting after meeting after meeting with no outcome. Text under the table: Are we REALLY talking about THIS again?

Fawn: “You’re a keeper — I’m working with the board to get you a raise.” Still waiting.

Supervisees absorb the chaos because that’s what you do when you care about the mission. You absorb it. You normalize it. You tell yourself this is just how nonprofit work feels.

And then you go find your people, and you walk to Dunkin’ Donuts.

Subscribe now

The Myth of the Culture Problem

The Us/Them split that forms in stressed organizations is not a culture problem. It is a predictable structural response to a leadership layer whose responsibilities outpace their support.

Good work depends on four load-bearing domains. They have a sequence. They create a cascade.

Physical Safety Is the Floor

I worked for the same teen parent program in two different settings.

The first was an inner city youth center. The door was always open. Staff relied on relationships with the youth to maintain safety — which meant safety was always contingent, always relational, always one bad interaction away from gone.

The second was a suburban office park. Fob to enter. Receptionist. Two more locked doors to reach your cubicle.

I didn’t feel safe in either one.

The first was too exposed. The second communicated threat through its own architecture — the building itself was telling me that something dangerous enough to require a fortress was happening here. That’s not reassuring. That’s activating.

Neither environment ever answered the question my nervous system was constantly assessing: am I okay here?

They just answered it differently badly.

That unresolved question — never fully surfacing, just running in the background — consumes the cognitive bandwidth that was supposed to go toward the work. You cannot think clearly when part of your brain is still doing perimeter checks.

Role Clarity Rests on Physical Safety

I was hired at a residential treatment program as a clinician in the long-term unit. I was paired with a case manager who handled limit-setting — deciding whether a kid got to keep their shoes, whether they earned a privilege. She was the boundary. I was the one who got to talk about feelings and coping skills.

The split was intentional. It had to be.

A kid could be furious at the case manager for taking their shoes and still talk to me about it. The therapeutic relationship depended on the functional separation. I was safe to talk to because I wasn’t the one making the hard calls.

Then the program got bought out by a larger organization. To save money, they decided to combine the two roles.

I knew at that meeting that I had to leave. I did not want to be the limit setter. Not because I couldn’t handle it — but because I understood what collapsing those roles would actually cost. The kid who needed to rage at someone and still have somewhere safe to put it. The therapeutic relationship that only worked because the functions were separate.

This is what role clarity actually means. Not org charts. Not job descriptions. The functional separation that makes the work itself possible.

When you blur it to save money, you don’t just change two job descriptions. You destroy the structural condition the work depends on. And the people who understand the work well enough to know what just broke — they’re the first ones out the door.

Operational Predictability Rests on Role Clarity

In a few organizations I have been genuinely confused about what my job was. The job description said one thing. The requests from the team were different. The level at which the team worked seemed very “heady” — and when I tried to describe what they wanted from me, I found myself swatting at the air.

So I defaulted to what I could see and touch. Organizing binders for retreats. Cleaning up databases. Concrete tasks in an environment that never gave me solid ground. And cleaning the bathroom that doubled as a storage closet. We were a small org.

I was fired because “it wasn’t working.” The triggering reason: I forgot a meeting with a colleague on the West Coast. I literally had to keep a picture of her next to my desk to remember what it was she wanted me to do.

But I was never really sure what they wanted from me in the first place.

I still feel like I failed — that the confusion was my fault and my ADHD. But I also now understand it was a predictability failure. When expectations are unspoken and the role is undefined, you do what nervous systems do in environments they cannot read — you find something solid to hold onto. Binders. Databases. Cleaning.

The forgotten meeting wasn’t the real issue. It was just the only concrete thing I did wrong. It gave the organization permission to end something that was already broken.

I know this because I spent part of that meeting coaching my supervisor through how to fire someone. She had never done it before. I had.

Another irony: this organization was in the middle of an intensive engagement with an organizational consultant — because the two lead executives were not speaking to each other. So the consultant mandated “feedback meetings.” Theoretically safe spaces for staff to share feedback about their working relationships. Like supervision, but not supervision. And a space is not safe just because you say it is.

Of course the role was undefined. Of course expectations were unspoken. The people responsible for setting direction weren’t speaking to each other. Operational predictability was impossible for everyone below them — because the leaders did not feel safe in each other’s presence.

Physical safety — unclear. Role clarity — fictional. Operational predictability — impossible. And emotional containment? The executives were transmitting their conflict downward and calling the fallout a staffing problem.

I was that staffing problem.

Emotional Containment Rests on All Three

The shattered glass on the floor didn’t start with my boss losing her temper.

It started with a work environment that never felt quite safe. Coupled with caseloads that were impossible — not difficult, impossible. Compounded by multiple grant sources that required different approaches with the same population, contradictory reporting timelines, incompatible data demands pulling the work in directions that couldn’t all be right at the same time.

It was an explosion waiting to happen.

By the time that glass hit the floor, every structural domain below it had already failed. The physical environment was compromised. Roles were impossible to hold at that volume. Operational predictability was a fiction when four funders were each demanding something different from the same staff with the same clients.

There was no floor left. And a leader with no floor cannot contain anything.

What she transmitted instead — the rage, the chaos, the unpredictability — shattered all sense of safety.

Did we understand the importance of getting our shit together now?

Pressure moves downward until it hits something it can shatter.

Shocked, the director and assistant director scurried back to their office.

The rest of us went to Dunkin’ Donuts.

If these patterns are showing up in your organization, the next question is not “What is wrong with our people?”

The better question is: “What conditions are making these responses necessary?”

Through Steadywork Partners, I help nonprofit and public-sector leaders identify the structural conditions driving burnout, conflict, withdrawal, over-compliance, and performance strain — and translate those findings into a practical Culture Repair Roadmap.

Learn more here: Work With Me: Culture Repair Roadmaps

You ordered the pizza and the salad. You sent the reminder. You set the table. You showed up early.

Then the silence happened.

Maybe nobody came. Maybe they darted in, grabbed a slice like they were shoplifting, feigned that they were too busy to stay, and disappeared back to their desks. Or maybe they stood in the doorway, said, "This looks great,” and didn’t touch a thing. Maybe one person came and sat with you in awkward silence.

You told yourself they were busy. You told yourself it’s hard to pull people away mid-afternoon—maybe bagel breakfast next time?

Here is what actually happened: your team just gave you a real-time assessment of their collective nervous system and the stability of your organization. And they didn’t say a word.

Subscribe now

The Gazelle on the Bluff

A trauma researcher once described safety using the image of a gazelle grazing on a bluff. The animal can see the full horizon in every direction. It has scanned for threats and found none. Because the environment has registered as safe, the nervous system stands down—and the gazelle can eat.

Human beings operate on the same two primary settings.

Rest and Digest: the parasympathetic nervous system that activates when the body perceives the environment as safe. When it's in charge, you can absorb nutrients, think creatively, and connect with others.

Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn: the sympathetic nervous system activates when the brain detects a threat and prepares for survival. Blood moves away from the digestive organs and toward the extremities. Sharing a meal is not on the agenda.

The biological reality is binary: you cannot be in a state of social connection and a state of survival at the same time.

The Empty Pizza Box Is a Diagnostic Tool

When people work in environments that trigger chronic sympathetic threat activation, they aren’t choosing to avoid the team and eat alone. Their nervous systems are making that choice for them. And leadership isn’t causing this—everyone is responding to an environment that contains unpredictable funding, role creep to account for turnover, and needs that always outpace resources. It is an impossible situation for anyone to sustain long-term without specific structural support.

Each version of the failed lunch tells a different story about how each member of your team responds to a low-grade threat.

The No-Show (Flight): Nobody comes because the risk of unstructured time with leadership is too high. They cannot afford a mistake or a misinterpreted comment. Avoiding the room is the only way to stay safe.

The “I’m Just Looking” (Fawn): They show up and compliment the spread but don’t eat. This is a performance of safety. They are there because showing up is the compliant choice, but their bodies are too restricted by anxiety to actually swallow or digest.

The Desk-Runner (Fight): They take the food but refuse the connection—reclaiming autonomy by taking the resource while rejecting the environment. They may trust each other. They view leadership as a threat to be avoided.

The Secret Social (Freeze): They eat together only when you aren’t there. This is the most important finding of all. It proves the capacity for connection exists. You—or the power you represent—are the perceived threat triggering the freeze response.

The Nonprofit Multiplier

In the nonprofit sector, chronic stress and structural instability form a feedback loop. Some of that structure is outside your control — funding will always be unpredictable. Some of it is not.

Unstable funding creates a persistent, low-grade financial calculus that never resolves—both for leadership who want to keep the doors open and for staff who want to keep the lights on at home. When you add goals that shift with every new grant cycle and diffuse accountability, people run a constant background threat assessment: the right answer yesterday may be wrong today.

When constantly navigating this territory, no one has the cognitive or emotional capacity left for the higher-order executive functioning that makes cooperation and genuine connection possible.

The nervous system is not impressed by free lunch. It responds to its surroundings. And surroundings are structural.

Fix the structure. Watch What Happens to Lunch.

Creating space for team bonding and sharing food is often a baseline of nonprofit culture. In lieu of bonuses and raises, we can appreciate each other, right? Right.

The pizza party isn’t the problem. The stability of the organization is the problem. You cannot eat your way out of a structure that generates stress responses.

The pizza party is actually a gift: you now know the nervous system state and survival patterns of your team. This is a benchmark you can measure against.

Consistency binds anxiety. Random pizza lunches actually heighten it—one more unpredictable event in an already unpredictable environment.

What stabilizes a nervous system is boring: consistent meeting schedules, written policies and procedures that are actively used, clear expectations around accountability, and safety protocols that are taken seriously. These are the conditions that allow the nervous system to stand down.

Before you plan the next culture-building event, walk through your building on a regular Tuesday at noon. Note where people are eating. Note who is eating alone. Note whether anyone is eating at all.

What you see is your team’s nervous system state made visible. Fix the structure. The lunch will follow.

Know a nonprofit leader struggling with ‘culture’ or ‘quiet quitting’? They don’t need a new pizza place; they need a new lens. Send them this.

Share

If these patterns are showing up in your organization, the next question is not “What is wrong with our people?”

The better question is: “What conditions are making these responses necessary?”

Through Steadywork Partners, I help nonprofit and public-sector leaders identify the structural conditions driving burnout, conflict, withdrawal, over-compliance, and performance strain — and translate those findings into a practical Culture Repair Roadmap.

Learn more here: Work With Me: Culture Repair Roadmaps

I remember the morning after the 2016 election.

My supervisor sat at her desk, wordless. Not moving. Just stunned. A room full of social workers—people trained to find language for the unspeakable, people who reframe for a living—and we had nothing.

We were terrified for our clients.

We were terrified for ourselves.

That was ten years ago.

But at least our clients were still there.

This time is different.

This time, our clients aren’t just at risk. They’re gone. Immigrants and undocumented people who have spent years building trust with service providers are going underground. They’re refusing services. They’re not answering phones. Families we have known for months or years have disappeared. Showing up now might get them deported—and we can’t protect them.

No one is following the rules.

I live in Maine, a targeted state. My husband—a brown man with a green card for twenty years—leaves for work every morning and I don’t know what the day holds. He may call from a jail cell. He may come home with pizza.

We don’t know.

I show up to work every day not sure if my life will be the same at 5 p.m. And I’m the one who’s supposed to hold my team together.

Subscribe now

The Biology of Survival

I have a confession: I watch Alone.

If you’re not familiar, the show drops survivalists into brutal wilderness environments with ten items and their wits. No camera crew. No teammates. Just you, the elements, and the slow psychological unraveling of isolation.

I’ve noticed something about who makes it for the long haul.

The successful contestants establish a routine immediately. Fire. Shelter. A system for finding food. Something predictable, repeated, controlled. They create enough structure that their nervous system can stand down—just enough—to let them do the actual work of survival.

And those who don’t make it?

They can’t poop.

I know. Stay with me.

This is not actually funny—or rather, it’s funny and it’s the whole point. When your body feels threatened, it redirects every available resource toward survival. Heart. Lungs. Legs. Everything else—including digestion and elimination—gets classified as nonessential and shut down.

Your body, in its biological wisdom, decides that pooping is a luxury it cannot currently afford.

Elimination is eliminated.

The contestants who struggle most never manage to create a routine that signals safety to their nervous system. Their bodies stay “clogged” because they remain in a permanent state of high alert—sometimes to the point of needing medical extraction.

From the Wilderness to the Office

What does this have to do with organizational culture—besides wishing your boss had their own private bathroom?

Everything.

Because the same biology that shuts down digestion on Alone is affecting your staff right now.

When the nervous system is activated—genuinely activated, not just stressed but threatened—the body diverts resources away from anything it doesn’t need to survive the immediate moment.

Higher-order thinking. Creativity. Collaboration. The capacity to sit in a meeting and thoughtfully engage with a strategic plan.

Gone. Redirected. Classified as nonessential.

The key to survival on Alone is creating enough routine, enough structure, enough predictability that the body receives the signal: I am safe enough to stand down. Safe enough to digest. Safe enough to think. Safe enough to do the work. The contestants who make it longest don’t just survive — they eventually start building instruments, carving art, inventing games. Their bodies have enough margin to be human again.

When you see a contestant washing their body, shaving their face — doing the slow, ordinary work of self-care — they’re probably going to make it for the long haul. The ability to do those ordinary things is itself a biological signal: the threat response has stood down.

The Wound of Moral Injury

Your staff cannot stand down right now.

They are walking into buildings every day not knowing which of their clients has disappeared overnight. Has their funding been frozen? Will they be able to pay their bills? They are doing the professional equivalent of shivering in a lean-to without a fire shouting ‘hey bear’—alert, half-dressed, ready to run.

What they are experiencing has a name.

Moral injury.

Moral injury happens when you are trained and willing to do your job, but the conditions make it impossible. The thing you’ve organized your professional identity around—protecting and serving people—is structurally unavailable to you.

When this injury becomes too heavy, your best people don’t just burn out—they vanish. They leave the field entirely because the gap between their values and their daily reality has become a frigid river they can no longer cross.

In this climate, structure isn’t just about efficiency; it is your primary retention strategy.

A disorganized workplace during a national crisis is a second trauma. But a workplace with clear lanes, predictable rhythms, and projects that can actually be finished?

That is a sanctuary.

If you can’t give them their clients back, give them a fire, food, and shelter.

The “Shower, Shit, and Shave” Protocol

There’s a concept in military and trauma recovery circles: when you arrive somewhere new, one of the first signs that your nervous system has stood down is your ability to complete basic hygiene.

A shower.

A shit.

A shave.

The ordinary vulnerability of taking care of your body.

Because when the threat is real, you cannot be naked. You can’t stand unhurried under hot water. You can’t close your eyes. You can’t be slow and embodied.

Your body won’t allow it.

The inverse is also true.

The ability to do those things is a signal to your brain: I am safe enough.

Is your staff feeling safe right now?

Go into your break room and check the expiration dates on your snacks. If most of them are expired, your team hasn’t felt safe enough to eat. Unless you have terrible taste in snacks, that’s a freeze response — bodies in survival mode don’t snack.

Think about your last meeting. Was the room either pulling teeth or dodging daggers — half the table checked out, half ready to snap? That’s freeze and fight in the same room.

Are some people burning through their PTO while others have suddenly become super-achievers who can’t stop taking on more work?

Flight looks like disappearing. It also looks like outrunning.

If you’re seeing any of this, your team is in survival mode. It’s time to build more structure.

Subscribe now

Do the Dishes

Critical moment. When people are disappearing and at each other’s throats, the instinct is to address the behavior directly. Team retreat. Communications consultant. Forced fun. We need to figure out how to get along!

On Alone, this is the moment when someone starts carving decorative spoons or building furniture before they’ve secured a reliable food source. It feels productive. It feels human.

But it burns calories they can’t afford.

An organization doing morale events before fixing its structure is doing the same thing.

My therapist once told me that when the world feels out of control, one of the most regulating things you can do is a discrete task.

Dishes.

Laundry.

A jigsaw puzzle.

Something with a beginning, a middle, and a guaranteed end. Something where your actions have predictable consequences.

Right now, your organization doesn’t need a field trip — it needs to do the dishes.

While the eternal threat is outside your control, there is a set of things entirely within your control:

• Consistent Meeting Times and Agendas: Predictability is the antidote to chaos.

• Communication Guardrails: Email for the record; Slack for the bagels.

• The Digital Library: Organize the Drive so no one has to hunt.

Structure binds anxiety.

When people know what they’re responsible for and what they can count on from leadership — even when everything outside is chaos — the internal environment sends a signal: this part is safe.

The Path Forward for Leaders

These are genuinely hard times to lead.

Fortunately, the path forward is simpler than it feels.

Build shelter. Build fire. Find food. Stockpile. Check in with your body.

Name it.

Tell your team you see the moral injury. Tell them their grief and rage are appropriate responses to what they are experiencing.

Give them the dishes.

Don’t just process feelings. Identify the internal work that needs doing — the systems that need building, the roles that need clarifying — and make that the work right now. This is genuine organizational stabilization that will matter when your clients come back.

Be the most predictable thing in their week.

Show up on time. Follow through. Make decisions and communicate them clearly.

If you are doing it right, you will start to see the signs:

People showing up ready, willing, and able to work. Engagement in meetings — problem-solving and collaboration returning. Professional conflict resolution instead of reactive conflict. People able to set limits and say no in the name of self-care.

The winners on Alone create predictable structures and follow them every day. Those structures sustain them longer than the game itself.

And interestingly, many of the people who make it to the very end don’t leave because they fail.

They tap out.

Once they have mastered survival, they are ready to take on something new.

Leadership in moments like this is not about inspiration. It is about stabilization. Your team doesn’t need another morale initiative or motivational speech. They need a workplace where their nervous system can stand down long enough to do the work they came here to do.

Build that, and your workplace becomes the camp — the place people return to when the world outside is uncertain.

Subscribe now

P.S. I created a free Steadywork Structure Check for nonprofit and public sector leaders who are trying to make sense of burnout, conflict, confusion, or constant reactivity inside their organizations.

It takes just a few minutes, and you’ll receive a result that helps you see whether the issue may be rooted in structure, capacity, or safety to speak up.

Take the free Structure Check

In 1968 Kitty Genovese was murdered in Queens, New York — a killing witnessed by dozens of neighbors, none of whom called for help. Everyone assumed someone else had called.

The reason is a phenomenon called “diffusion of responsibility,” first documented by social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané. Their research showed that the more people present in an emergency, the less likely any individual is to act.

CPR training solved the problem. With one finger and a simple sentence.

You. Call 911.

When you identify that someone needs emergency assistance, before you start compressions, before you do anything else—you look into the crowd, you point directly at one specific person, and you say, “You. Call 911.”

Not “someone get help.” Not “Can anyone call 911?”—one person. Direct eye contact. Unambiguous assignment. “You. Call 911.”

This is a structural intervention that saves lives. You point at one person. Ownership becomes clear. The structure does the work that individual decision-making alone cannot.

I want you to hold that image—the pointed finger, the direct assignment—and then come with me to a very different scene.

Subscribe now

You are in a staff meeting. Normal week, actually a slow week—nothing catastrophic. Someone mentions — maybe you mention — that the organization’s Google Drive is a mess. Files from 2019 nested inside folders no one named. Three versions of the same document with no indication of which is current. New staff can’t find anything. Veteran staff have stopped looking and are saving everything to their desktops.

You say, “Everyone take some time this week and go through the Drive and organize a part of it.”

Reasonable. Completely reasonable.

At the next meeting, nothing has happened. You’re frustrated. Or—and this is more common—you’ve forgotten you said it entirely, because last week was slow and this week isn’t, and something more important landed in your inbox.

No one is “the weakest link” in this story—it’s “someone get help”—a collective task with no owner, no system, no deadline, and no defined standard for what “organized” even means.

Diffusion of responsibility in slow motion.

No one organized the Drive. Because everyone thought someone else would do it.

Here’s the thing about the Google Drive. It isn’t just annoying. It’s expensive. And erodes morale.

When was the last time you were immediately able to find a shared document that someone else saved?

When we can’t find documents, we spend time looking. When we can’t find the right version, we use the wrong one. Then, inevitably, we give up on the system entirely. We consistently recreate work that already exists.

Or the “sorry to bother” text/email/Slack interrupts colleagues who are also trying to do three other things— “Do you know where…” “Was that a docx or Google?” “Was that an attachment or a link?” “Next time add ‘use me’ to the name.” The irritated inner voice: “We are on deadline, don’t you know?" —or maybe that’s your outer voice. Now you have relationship repair to deal with. But first—where is the damn document?

Over time, this compounds like rust on your undercarriage—you can’t see it, but eventually it’s going to give out. Annoyance, frustration, and irritability lead to panic and exhaustion.

The basic infrastructure of getting things done is working against us.

I had a colleague who left his keys next to his lunch in his refrigerator every night. He knew he would forget where he put his keys—and he would regularly forget his lunch. But he wouldn’t be able to leave without his keys, and then he would never forget his lunch.

Keys—somewhere specific, consistent, and non-negotiable. A system that makes forgetting nearly impossible and prevents chaos and stress.

The structure protects us from the limits of human attention.

Organizations need the same thing. And it’s probably the most boring thing ever—especially when you have people who need your help.

Franklin Covey’s WIG framework — Wildly Important Goals — operates on this same principle. The “wildly important” part isn’t about drama or scale. It’s about focus: identifying the one or two things that, if done consistently, produce disproportionate results.

The system works because it underscores the value of slowing down and creating clear systems that support day-to-day work. It removes the ambient uncertainty that makes collective work so exhausting.

A well-structured Google Drive is a WIG. Not glamorous. Not the stuff of leadership retreats. But the kind of operational clarity that, when it exists, saves hours every week — and when it doesn’t, slowly drains the energy of everyone working inside it.

I once managed a retreat for “eminent” professors discussing globalization. I handled every invisible detail—travel, room assignments, even seating charts. At the end, the late Paul Farmer gave me the best feedback of my career: “I want to thank Heather for organizing this. I didn’t even know it was being managed—which means it was being managed extremely well.” He’d been to a few retreats in his life—he knew what he was talking about. They could focus on the world’s problems instead of wondering if they were getting chicken or fish.

If you are noticing annoyance, frustration, irritability, panic, or exhaustion in your team—dollars to donuts, it’s a structural problem.

You point at one person. You name the task. You set the standard. You build the system that makes it almost impossible to forget your keys.

Most of the leaders I work with arrive having already tried the motivation approach. The team retreats. The difficult conversations. The coaches and the trainings.

And things haven’t changed — because the structure hasn’t changed.

Before you can repair a culture, you have to see the structural conditions producing it. The chaos in your Drive. The assignment with no follow-up. The role with three supervisors and no clear decision authority. The task assigned to everyone, owned by no one.

These aren’t small things. They are the operational infrastructure for whether your staff can do their jobs without burning through cognitive and emotional resources just navigating the basics.

Ownership is the only known cure for the crowd.

I’m looking at you, kid.

P.S. I created a free Steadywork Structure Check for nonprofit and public sector leaders who are trying to make sense of burnout, conflict, confusion, or constant reactivity inside their organizations.

It takes just a few minutes, and you’ll receive a result that helps you see whether the issue may be rooted in structure, capacity, or safety to speak up.

Take the free Structure Check

For decades, the nonprofit sector has been told to prove “efficiency” — because that’s what funders demand.

There’s a problem:
Efficiency only makes sense when you’re producing a product.

In 7th-grade shop class, efficiency is simple. How much wood becomes the birdhouse versus how much ends up as scraps on the floor?
Less waste = more profit.
That’s logical.

But what is the “waste” in trauma recovery?
What is the “raw material” in foster care?
What is the “product” in domestic violence response?

When funders demand efficiency in human services, here’s what it produces:

• Cut overhead → offices that aren’t ADA accessible

• Do more with less → 10-year-old computers and unsafe facilities

• Stretch every dollar → wages so low only new grads or retirees can afford to work there - and they leave after 2 years

• Deliver more impact per FTE → crushing caseloads that guarantee burnout

We’ve been measuring human-centered work with tools designed for factory floors — and then wondering why nonprofits keep “failing” at the very things funders say they want: staff retention, program outcomes, documentation accuracy, and organizational stability.

It gets worse.

Efficiency isn’t just the wrong tool — it’s an artifact of oppression, created to control workers and maximize profit.

The metric was never designed for us.

Subscribe now

Where Efficiency Came From (and Why It Doesn’t Belong in Human Services)

In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management — the book that reshaped 20th-century work.

Taylor was a mechanical engineer who believed workers were lazy, resistant, and needed to be controlled. His solution: reduce human labor to measurable, controllable units.

• Time-motion studies

• Output maximization

• Job specialization

• The “one best way” to perform a task

Taylorism gave us the management tools that still structure nonprofit evaluation:

• cost accounting and overhead ratios

• unit-based budgeting and performance quotas

• job specialization that fragments care

• surveillance disguised as “accountability”

As Chapman University’s retrospective on Taylor notes, he changed the way people worked by reducing human labor to measurable units.

That logic makes sense if you are manufacturing steel.

It makes zero sense if you are:

• building trust with a suicidal teen

• supporting a domestic violence survivor

• stabilizing a family in crisis

• helping a veteran find housing

• responding to trauma

Taylorism was designed for machines.
Nonprofits work with people.

The mismatch isn’t subtle — it’s foundational.
And foundations still use Taylorism to decide whether they will fund our work.

The Mistrust Layer: How Philanthropy Imported Industrial Control

The nonprofit sector never chose Scientific Management as its framework for evaluation.
It inherited it.

As philanthropy professionalized in the early 20th century, funders wanted to be sure their money wasn’t being “wasted.” So they reached for the dominant management logic of the era — Scientific Management — and imported its tools wholesale into social services.

What began as an industrial method for controlling factory labor was reframed as a “rational” and “fair” way to judge nonprofit worthiness:

• measurable outputs

• standardized units of service

• overhead ratios

• cost-per-client

• performance quotas

• documentation as proof of morality

Nonprofits didn’t adopt these tools because they made sense for human-centered work.
They adopted them because their funding depended on it.

And once Scientific Management entered philanthropy, it reshaped the entire sector’s operating assumptions. It traveled alongside mechanisms funders still rely on today:

• restricted funding

• spend-down rules

• narrow allowable-cost categories

• extensive reporting requirements

• multi-layered approval chains

These are not accountability mechanisms.
They are control mechanisms.

And they come from the same lineage as:

• the Elizabethan Poor Laws

• the “deserving vs. undeserving” poor

• workhouses

• charity surveillance

• moral judgment embedded in aid

So when funders say they worry nonprofits “can’t handle” unrestricted support, the echo is unmistakable:

Poverty indicates moral weakness.
Weakness demands control.
Control demands measurement.
Measurement enforces efficiency.

This isn’t stewardship.
It’s a belief system we inherited without question — and keep enforcing without asking why.

And it shows up everywhere — not just in grant applications.

Why Encampments Become “Evidence” of Inefficiency

Take homeless encampments.

Encampments are routinely invoked as evidence that shelters are inefficient.
The logic goes:

• If shelters were doing their job, we wouldn’t see tents.

• If people are outside, someone inside the system must be failing.

This logic only works if you believe human beings behave like toy birds placed into birdhouses — passive objects that simply go where they’re put.

But we are not building birdhouses with predictable inputs and linear outputs.
Real birds don’t always stay in the birdhouses built for them.

We are working with people — many of whom are making the only choice that preserves their dignity:

Independence and safety outdoors over the humiliation, surveillance, or dehumanizing rules of a shelter system.

Efficiency ideology doesn’t ask why people avoid shelters.
It doesn’t ask what conditions shelters require to be trauma-informed or safe.
It doesn’t ask how funding structures undermine stability, staffing, or care.

It asks only one question:

“Where is the waste?”

Because efficiency treats every human deviation as evidence of system failure — rather than as information about unmet need, autonomy, culture, trauma, or dignity.

Why Efficiency Harms Nonprofits

When you apply industrial-era tools to human-centered work, the outcomes are predictable:

1. Staff work from survival mode.

Hypervigilance. Micromanagement. Learned helplessness. Lateral violence. Turnover. Exhaustion.
This is not leadership failure — it is a trauma response to a hostile measurement system.

2. Nonprofits begin performing for the metric instead of the mission.

What gets measured gets performed — even if it undermines healing.
Often there is what gets documented, and then there is the real work.

3. Trauma-informed work gets distorted into quantifiable “units.”

Healing doesn’t scale like manufacturing.
Trust cannot be measured in billable hours or productivity.

4. Funders begin rewarding suffering.

Lean budgets, stressed staff, relentless output — martyrdom becomes a strategy for survival.

5. Leaders internalize moral messages disguised as metrics.

Not just “overhead is waste,” but something more insidious:

“My donation should go directly to the poor.”
“Find someone else to pay your rent.”
“Figure out how to staff your program without staffing costs.”

Nonprofits learn to feel ashamed of the resources required to function. We whisper with relief when a grant will cover “operations.” We treat “unrestricted funding” like a miracle.

When basic organizational survival feels like a stroke of luck rather than a norm, that tells you everything about the ideology we’ve inherited.

Efficiency was never about waste.
It was about getting the most for their money.
And it’s been undermining the sector ever since.

And Because Nobody Stepped Outside the Game…

The cycle continued.

Most nonprofit leaders come up through the sector.
They inherit the norms before they ever have the chance to question them.

We learn — implicitly, relentlessly — that funder demands are fixed laws of nature.
We absorb the belief that our job is to do more with less — because ‘more money should go to the poor.’

We internalize the idea that we are supposed to sacrifice ourselves to serve others:

• accept salaries our for-profit peers wouldn’t get out of bed for

• stretch our teams to the breaking point

• operate without support, infrastructure, or stability — because “the mission comes first”

And the culture reinforces it everywhere:

“You’re doing God’s work.”
“You’re a saint.”
“We need more people like you.”

It sounds like praise, but it functions like a moral command:

Suffering is noble.
Self-sacrifice is expected.
Stability is selfish.
Asking for more is greed.

Burnout isn’t a personal failing.
It is the predictable outcome of a value system that treats deprivation as virtue, sacrifice as moral purity, and under-resourcing as “efficiency.”

When We Removed Efficiency and Mistrust — Everything Changed

MacKenzie Scott’s multi-billion-dollar experiment stepped outside the game and dared to ask:

• What happens when nonprofits are trusted?

• What happens when oversight is replaced with abundance?

• What happens when efficiency is not the goal?

The results were unequivocal:

• 85% reported increased financial stability

• 90% expanded community impact

• Operating reserves doubled within two years

• Innovation surged

• Collaboration increased

• Burnout decreased

• Strategic thinking returned

The nonprofits didn’t change.
The constraints did.

When you stop forcing organizations into Taylorist frameworks, they stop behaving like traumatized systems.
They start behaving like visionary ones.

Nothing changed about the missions.
Nothing changed about the people.
Nothing changed about the work.

Only the measurement system changed.

If Efficiency Was Never the Right Tool… What Should Replace It?

This is where the sector has been stuck.

For 30 years, every “new” measurement model has been a variation on the same theme. Whether it’s:

• output-driven

• logic-model driven

• causality-driven

• funder-driven

• data-driven

• compliance-driven

—even the progressive versions (developmental evaluation, “impact science,” social return on investment) still rely on the same industrial scaffolding.

They all ask some version of the same question:

“How do we prove the efficient use of your money, and how did it directly affect the client?”

It is a question rooted in scarcity, suspicion, and the belief that both the recipient and the conduit of money must demonstrate moral and economic worthiness.

Instead, we should be asking:

“What conditions actually support the outcomes we all claim to care about?”

Let’s be honest:

Impact metrics from structurally traumatized organizations are not indicators of performance.

They are indicators of harm.

You are only capturing the survival responses of systems held together with duct tape, urgency, and human sacrifice.

Until funders stop scoring nonprofits on the fumes of an exhausted workforce and start resourcing the conditions that actually make impact possible, the numbers will continue to tell the same story:

Crisis masquerading as inefficiency.

Nonprofits Don’t Need Better Metrics. They Need a New Paradigm.

Nonprofit work has been forced for decades into systems designed for factory floors, not human beings.

Our labor is not assembling birdhouses.
Our “raw materials” are not screws and boards.
Our output is not a product moving down a conveyor belt.

Our labor is emotional, relational, stabilizing, and deeply human.

We are fortifying people so they can move through crisis and get back to their lives with safety and dignity.

You cannot evaluate emotional labor with industrial-era product-oriented output metrics.

Yet funders have focused almost exclusively on lag measures — the end results:

• exits to housing

• number of families served

• service hours delivered

• “successful completions”

• case closure rates

Lag measures tell you only what happened after everything else was already set in motion.
They reveal nothing about whether the organization was ever positioned to produce meaningful, ethical, trauma-informed outcomes.

And when lag measures look underwhelming, funders often reach the same conclusion:
The organization must be inefficient.

After all — the grant proposal said that with X amount of money the organization would deliver Y amount of results.

You wrote it.

The funder believed it.
They awarded the money.

Now, when the lag measures disappoint, it looks like the nonprofit overpromised, underdelivered, or worse — misled them.

But funders are looking at the wrong end of the equation.

A nonprofit’s outcomes are determined long before a single service unit is delivered.

If you want to know whether an organization can carry out its mission, you must look at lead measures — the structural and relational conditions that make meaningful impact possible.

These conditions are not “nice to have.”
They are the prerequisites for everything funders care about.

Below are the actual lead indicators of a healthy, sustainable, trauma-informed nonprofit organization.
When these four pillars are present, services can do what they were designed to do — at scale, with integrity, and without burning people out.

1. Organizational Stability

Predictability.
Operating reserves.
Right-sized staffing.
Functional infrastructure.
Built-in redundancy — the breathing room every system needs so someone can take a vacation.

Organizational stability is not “overhead.”
It is the scaffolding that holds the mission up.

No for-profit company is expected to operate without these things.
Nonprofits shouldn’t be expected to either.

2. Human Sustainability

Psychological safety.
Caseload viability.
Manageable emotional load.
Staff retention.

Human services are delivered by humans.
If the humans are depleted, overworked, or in survival mode, the work cannot be effective — no matter how compelling the grant proposal - or how much praise we get at holiday parties.

3. Relational Impact

Trust.
Continuity of care.
Belonging.
Meaning.

These are not “soft outcomes.”
They are the mechanisms that produce transformation.

Every evidence-based model — from cognitive behavioral therapy to harm reduction to trauma-informed practice — relies on relationship as the active ingredient.

But relationships cannot take root in unstable, underfunded systems. This includes relationships among staff and between staff and clients.

4. Systemic Alignment

Funding that actually matches the real cost of delivering the work:

• infrastructure

• staffing

• training

• supervision

• technology

• administrative support

• reasonable timelines

• predictable multi-year investments

Impact is not created by squeezing labor.
Impact is created by resourcing labor.

Nonprofits never took a vow of poverty.
They simply do not create a measurable product to sell.

These Are Not “Soft Metrics.”

They Are the Prerequisites for Impact.

Measure reading improvement in a school where teachers have 45 students and no planning time — the metrics will look bad.

Measure family stability in an agency where case managers turn over every eight months — the metrics will look bad.

Measure trauma recovery in programs funded by one-year grants with no overhead and no continuity — the metrics will look bad.

The metrics look bad because you are measuring the wrong thing.

They look exactly like what happens when you apply industrial metrics to human service systems.

The Paradigm Shift the Sector Needs

It’s time to retire efficiency.

It was never designed for us — and it never measured what matters.

Stop measuring how efficiently nonprofits can absorb suffering.

Start measuring whether nonprofits have the conditions required to create meaningful, sustainable impact.

That is the shift the sector needs.

Dear Donor,

I keep seeing your holiday wish list circulating in nonprofit land:
Show us the “authentic” behind-the-scenes.
Pull back the curtain.
Show us how hard you work for our money.

You want:

• Pictures of late-night envelope stuffing with timestamps
• Videos of office chaos before the big event
• LinkedIn posts of messy desks covered in handwritten thank-you notes
• Instagram reels of staff grinding through year-end with visible dedication
• (Expensive) Glossy cards in the mail featuring happy-but-sad-enough “consumers”

But here’s what you’re actually asking for: a performance that perpetuates organizational trauma — designed to make you feel good.

And just like porn, we’re not showing the real story.
We’re showing the version of “real” you’ve trained us to offer — a curated display of struggle designed to unlock your tax deduction.

We’re expected to strike the right note of suffering and still out-perform our peers to earn your charitable dollars.

Why do you want to see our dirty laundry?
Why can’t we present our best selves?
Why do we have to perform suffering in the first place?

Subscribe now

What’s Really Behind the Curtain

Beneath that performance is a truth uglier than your ugliest Christmas sweater:

We could be home with our families, just like you.
But your tax structure turned the holidays into performance season.
Everything ships by November because your checks need a December 31st timestamp.

After that? The urgency evaporates — right along with the deduction.

So we push our teams.
We scramble.
We deliver the hustle you expect.

Some organizations — the ones who can afford development staff — start “year-end” in June.
That’s thousands of dollars of staff time spent preparing for your tax break.

The Trauma This System Perpetuates

Hypervigilance.
Organizations learn their survival depends on performing need in exactly the right way at exactly the right time. Miss the performance? Lose funding.

Scarcity thinking.
The organizations that hit the right note of desperate — but not too desperate — get resources; the ones building sustainability get punished.

Year-end crisis mode.
Not because December is good for mission work — but because December 31st is your deadline. And you get to tell the holiday table how you “gave back” this year.

Who’s really performing now?

What We Actually Need

The problem isn’t that nonprofits aren’t giving you what you want this season.
Oh, we’ll do our best to give you exactly what you’ve asked for.

The problem is that we’ve normalized a funding model where organizations must continuously prove their worthiness to survive.

“Authenticity” is this year’s Christmas gift request.
Next year, you’ll want something else.

Do you know what we want for Christmas?

A system that doesn’t require us to beg to help others.
Consistent funding throughout the fiscal year.
Respect.