What leadership drag is quietly costing Canadian not-for-profits, and why the fix is not another strategic plan
The hardest problems inside a not-for-profit rarely announce themselves as leadership problems. They show up as a funder report rewritten at 10 p.m., a decision that keeps reopening, a good executive director quietly burning out. Ed Yee argues these are symptoms of one hidden cost, and that the leaders carrying it do not have to carry it alone.
It is 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, and the Executive Director is rewriting a funder report because the program numbers and the finance numbers do not match. Again. Tomorrow morning, the board will spend forty minutes reopening a decision that was closed in March. On Thursday, she will take a donor meeting alone because of constrained resources.
None of this will appear in the audited statements. No line item reads “decision reopened,” “meeting after the meeting,” or “Executive Director doing three other people’s thinking.” But every leader reading this knows those costs are real and knows roughly what they feel like at the end of a long week.
I chair a Sterling Executive peer group for not-for-profit leaders, and I have sat with many CEOs and Executive Directors as they described weeks exactly like that one. What strikes me is not how hard these leaders work, but how much of that work is repair work. Fixing, re-explaining, re-deciding, smoothing over. In our groups we call it leadership drag: the friction an organization generates internally and then pays for out of the mission.
It Is Not a Commitment Problem
Leadership drag is not from a lack of care. I have rarely met a not-for-profit leader who did not care deeply. It is not a lack of skill or effort either. The sector is full of talented people doing more with less than any business would tolerate.
The drag results from somewhere else. It comes from small, daily moments where leadership is practiced unevenly: how a concern gets raised, how a disagreement gets handled, whether a commitment made gets carried out. Each moment seems minor. Multiplied across a senior team, over time they become the reason the organization feels heavier to run than it should.
And in the not-for-profit sector, this drag takes forms that private sector leaders never have to face. Four of them come up in almost every conversation I have.
The Mission Shield
A hard performance conversation is uncomfortable. In a not-for-profit, it can feel like a betrayal. When everyone is there for the cause, challenging a colleague’s follow-through feels dangerously close to questioning their commitment. Nobody wants to be the person who did that to someone serving the mission.
So, the conversation does not happen. The concern goes sideways instead: raised gently, softened in the moment. Conflict in this sector arrives dressed in moral language, and that makes it harder to handle, not easier. Teams that pride themselves on kindness can quietly become teams where nothing difficult ever gets said in the room where it could be resolved.
Underpaid Loyalty
There is a second, quieter version of the same pattern. Many of your best people are underpaid. They may have left a role in the private sector and taken a pay cut to work for you. You know it, and they know it. When their follow-through slips, you soften the line. After all, how do you hold a firm standard with someone you feel you are underpaying?
The intention is generous. The effect is corrosive. Standards held out of guilt become standards held unevenly, and your strongest performers notice first. The people carrying the most weight watch weaker performance go unaddressed, and obvious conclusions are drawn about what the organization expects. That is how burnout starts; not from the workload alone, but from carrying the workload and the confusion.
The Fundraiser in the Building
Here is the cost that should worry boards most. In many not-for-profits, the CEO or Executive Director is a key fundraising engine. They are the person funders trust, the person major donors want across the table, the keeper of the story. In the private sector, companies employ a sales team that can handle meetings with customers. CEOs in these organizations often do not have the same expectation of meeting with all the key customers to the same degree.
Every hour the NFP leader spends refereeing an internal dispute, re-closing a decision, or rewriting someone else’s report is an hour that does not go to a funder, a partner, or a gift.
The relationship is direct. Every internal mess the Executive Director absorbs is a donor conversation that never happens. When a leadership team cannot hold its own line, the organization loses revenue.
The Volunteer Board
The fourth pattern is structural. Not-for-profits are governed by volunteers. They are generous, well-meaning people who often have never run an operation like the one they oversee. The result is a role confusion that most Executive Directors manage weekly: the committee that drifts from governance into operations; the strategic discussion that becomes like a second management team.
Add a long-tenured founder whom nobody — board included — is quite willing to challenge, and the drag compounds. None of these people behave badly. But the leader in the middle spends enormous energy translating, buffering, and re-establishing clarity that should not need re-establishing.
One Pattern, Not Five Problems
These look like separate issues: a conflict issue; a retention issue; a fundraising issue; and a governance issue. In my experience, they are usually one issue wearing different clothes. The senior team has never actually agreed on how leadership will be practiced when things are hard: how disagreement gets raised in the room, how a decision gets closed and stays closed, how commitments get followed through.
Most organizations have values on the wall or in their annual report. Words like respect, trust, stewardship, and service. Those words matter. But they do not tell anyone what to do at 4 p.m. on a Thursday when a colleague is missing a commitment, and the deadline is Monday. Until the team defines what its values look like in daily practice, every leader fills the gap with their own version, and the versions do not match. That mismatch is the drag.
“We Can’t Spend on Ourselves”
I know the objection, because I hear it constantly: spending time or money on the leadership team feels like taking it from the mission. In a sector built on scarcity, working on yourselves can feel almost self-indulgent. It feels like spending money on leadership development is taking away from programs for the good of the community.
I would ask leaders to honestly answer this question. What did the last avoidable senior departure cost you? What was the cost of recruitment, in lost relationships, in months of board distraction and executive time? These costs never appear in the budget, but the organization pays them in full, every year, out of the mission. The costs expand into six figures in many cases.
Not investing in senior leadership development is costing the community money to run programs and services. Thinking otherwise is a serious mistake.
Where To Begin
This work begins with addressing one recurring issue like the staffing problem everyone is avoiding. Take that one issue and ask a different question: not “who dropped the ball?” but “what leadership practice is weak here?”
That question changes the conversation. It moves the team away from blame and toward the pattern. Agree on how the team will handle that one situation from now on. Hold it for ninety days. Then look at whether the issue comes back. Early evidence, on one real problem, does more than any framework ever will.
You Do Not Have to Work This Out Alone
The hardest part of this work is that the person who must lead it — the CEO or Executive Director — is also the person with nowhere to take it. You cannot think out loud about a struggling leader within your senior team. Your role is crowded with people yet also starved of peers.
That is the problem Sterling Executive groups exist to solve. Our NFP executive peer group looks at strategic leadership issues from the lens of leaders who are not in the private sector. We focus on providing the platform and venue to talk about the important topics shaping our leadership and our organizations. The needs and goals of private sector and non-private sector organizations can be quite different. Our NFP peer group provides the forum to focus on the unique needs of this sector.
Our members are CEOs and Executive Directors who carry the same weight as you do. They are leaders of not-for-profits and operating organizations who understand funder pressure, board dynamics, and staff strain from the inside. The room is confidential, candid, and chaired. Members bring the real issue, not the polished version of it, and leave with their thinking sharper and more precise. Membership can provide relief: the discovery that the issues exhausting a leader are not unique to them, and not a verdict on them.
Being a member of the Sterling Executive Group NFP peer group can help bring discipline to how members turn that relief into results. We work with group members to define what good leadership practice looks like in their organization. Members experience it inside the group before they ever bring it back to their organization.
The return on investment can be substantial. Experiencing and internalizing best leadership practices, and what to avoid, is what this is all about. The opportunity to learn from many of the best executives in the NFP sector is an opportunity that is unique. It is well worth the time investment and resources in yourself and by extension your organization.
If you are serious about serving the needs of your constituents, joining our NFP executive peer group is part of the solution.
Final Thought
The not-for-profit sector asks its leaders to deliver more with less certainty every year. Under that pressure, how a senior team practices leadership day to day is not a soft topic. It is the hidden foundation of mission delivery, and one of the few costs a leader can truly take back.
The drag is real. It is also fixable. And the leaders fixing it are not doing it alone.
Ed Yee chairs the Sterling Executive Group for the Not-For-Profit Sector, a confidential peer group for CEOs and Executive Directors of Canadian not-for-profit organizations.
