How Do I Know If My Nonprofit Needs Help?
Most nonprofit leaders would tell you their strategy is understood. Ask them directly and they'll point to the strategic plan, the board retreat, the all-staff meeting where the priorities were laid out. What they usually haven't done is check.
Here's the test I use with almost every organization I work with: pull a handful of managers at random, mid-level people who weren't in the room when strategy was decided, and ask them to name the organization's top priorities unprompted. Not "does this sound familiar when I read it to you." Unprompted. What comes out of that exercise is usually the clearest signal an organization will get about whether it needs help, long before turnover spikes or a funder starts asking hard questions.
The gap between talking and landing
There's a lot of research behind why this happens, and most of it lands somewhere between two failure modes.
In some organizations, strategy simply isn't talked about below the leadership table. It gets treated as leadership's job to hold and everyone else's job to execute, so nobody owns translating it downward as an ongoing function. Robert Kaplan and David Norton built their case for a dedicated "Office of Strategy Management" around a version of this problem: on average, the vast majority of employees in a typical organization don't understand, or aren't even aware of, the strategy they're supposedly executing.
In other organizations, the opposite is true. Leadership talks about strategy constantly, in emails, all-hands meetings, town halls. Communication isn't the problem, translation is. A multi-year study of 250-plus companies by Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull found that only about half of middle managers could name even one of their organization's top five priorities, despite the volume of communication aimed at them. The finding that stuck with me most is that the real breakdown isn't vertical, it's horizontal. Leaders assume the message cascaded because the message was sent. Nobody checked whether it translated into how people actually work together across departments.
Underneath both patterns sits a third, quieter one: the priorities that get named rarely show up in a budget. Research from Michael Mankins and Richard Steele found that most organizations don't connect their strategic priorities to how they allocate resources, which means you can't measure what you never funded in the first place. It's one of the most consistently repeated findings across the literature, and it matters because measurement and money are the same failure wearing two faces.
What this looked like from where I sat
I didn't learn any of this from a client engagement first. I learned it as a middle manager, years before I ever called myself a consultant, leading a team through a change I hadn't made the call on.
I worked in Ontario's autism services sector during the shift from a direct-service funding model, where the province handed funding and clients directly to organizations, to an individualized model, where families received the money and chose where to spend it. Overnight, organizations that had operated on predictable, guaranteed annual revenue were competing for the same families, the same funding, and the same reputation for "excellence of care" as every other provider in the region.
Leadership started having conversations they'd never needed before: margins, fee-for-service programs, what happened when a family's allotment didn't cover the true cost of care. I sat close enough to those conversations to understand the logic. My team didn't, and I was the one standing between the decision and the people who had to live it out day to day. When I tried to explain why we needed to change how we operated, what came back was resistance rooted in one word: money. Not the reasoning behind it. Not what it protected. Just money, because that was the only part that had reached them clearly.
I didn't have a clean version of the "why" handed down to me either. I was piecing it together myself while trying to build a case for people who trusted me a great deal more than they trusted an executive team they'd never spoken with directly. Looking back, this is almost exactly what Sull, Homkes and Sull describe: strategy failing to survive translation, and nobody checking whether the person doing the translating, in this case me, had what they needed to carry it. The mistake wasn't that leadership talked about money. It's that strategy had been treated as something they held and everyone below them simply executed, rather than something the people in the middle needed real context to translate and own themselves. Change doesn't fail because people are stubborn. It fails because people, at every level, are asked to change their behaviour without ever being shown why it connects to something they already care about.
Three other signs worth naming
The awareness gap above tends to be the deepest one, but a handful of other patterns show up often enough to name here.
Strategy execution has no owner. It gets bolted onto someone's existing role, usually a senior leader who's already stretched thin, instead of being treated as its own ongoing function.
Priorities and budgets live in separate documents. If you can't trace a dollar to a stated priority, that priority is aspirational, not operational.
New behaviour is expected but never built, trained, or evaluated for. This is the one I find myself pushing past where most of the strategy literature stops. Kaplan and Norton name competency alignment as something a strategy office should own, but the mainstream literature mostly treats it as a checkbox. It rarely engages with how you'd actually build the specific behavioural repertoire a change requires, which is exactly the applied behaviour analysis lens I bring to this work.
The real work
Communication skills and better slide decks rarely fix this. What actually changes outcomes is whether strategy is something one group holds and everyone else receives, or something everyone has enough context and skill to carry themselves.
If any part of this sounds like your organization, you're describing a solvable, well-documented pattern. It's also exactly where I start with the leadership teams I work with.
If you're not sure whether it applies to you yet, let's talk it through. Book a strategy call.