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Challenge 50 in the series 50 Reasons Why It Is Hard to Run a Nonprofit
This is the last challenge in the series. I saved it for last on purpose.
Over the course of 49 posts, I've written about underfunding, burnout, board dysfunction, volunteer risk, for-profit competition, political attacks, founder's syndrome, and a dozen other forces that make nonprofit work harder than it should be. Every one of those challenges is real. And every one of them gets worse when an organization doesn't know what it stands for.
Values are the operating system. When the operating system is broken, everything else malfunctions.
The challenge as I describe it in Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience has three parts, and most nonprofits fail at least one of them.
Failure to articulate. Many organizations have never written down their values in a meaningful way. They have a mission statement on the website and maybe a vision statement in their strategic plan. But values — the principles that guide how the organization operates, how decisions get made, how people treat each other — often exist as vague understandings rather than explicit commitments.
Ask five staff members at a typical nonprofit to name the organization's core values, and you'll get five different answers. That's an articulation failure.
Failure to apply. Some organizations have articulated their values beautifully. They're framed on the conference room wall. They appear in the employee handbook. They show up in the annual report.
And then nobody uses them to make a decision. When the budget gets tight, do values guide what gets cut? When a major donor behaves badly, do values guide the response? When a staff member raises an ethical concern, do values determine how it's handled? In most organizations, the answer is no — values are decorative, not operational.
Failure to police. The hardest part. Even organizations that articulate and apply their values often fail to enforce them consistently. The board member who violates the conflict-of-interest policy gets a pass because she's a major donor. The program director who creates a toxic work environment keeps his job because his programs bring in grants. The ED who cuts corners on reporting faces no consequences because the board doesn't know or doesn't want to know.
Selective enforcement of values is worse than having no values at all. It teaches everyone in the organization that the rules apply to some people and not others — which is the fastest way to destroy organizational culture.
I've watched organizations with strong values weather crises that would have destroyed weaker ones. And I've watched organizations with weak values crumble under pressure that shouldn't have been fatal. The difference is predictable.
When values are clear, applied, and enforced, staff know how to make decisions without waiting for permission. A case manager facing an ethical dilemma doesn't need to call the ED — she knows what the organization stands for and acts accordingly.
Board members can govern effectively because values provide the framework for difficult calls — including the hardest ones, like addressing founder's syndrome (Challenge 43) or confronting a colleague who isn't performing.
Trust builds internally and externally because the organization's behavior matches its rhetoric. (I wrote about the gap between stated values and lived experience in Challenge 19 — it's one of the most potent sources of staff dissatisfaction.)
And accountability becomes possible. You can hold someone to a standard only if the standard has been articulated and applied to everyone.
The organizations that get this right treat values the way they treat budgets — as operational documents that get reviewed, applied to real decisions, and updated when circumstances change.
That means writing values specific enough to use. "We value integrity" tells nobody anything. "We report our outcomes honestly, including when the results are disappointing" tells everyone exactly what integrity means here. Write values that could actually settle an argument.
It means referencing values in real decisions — a hire, a budget cut, a program change. "Which of our values applies here, and what does it tell us to do?" That question takes 30 seconds and changes the quality of the conversation entirely.
It means applying values to everyone, especially leadership. The moment a senior leader gets an exception, the values lose their force. If the conflict-of-interest policy applies to board members, it applies to the board chair. No exceptions. This is where organizational courage lives.
It means reviewing and revising. An organization's understanding of what it stands for should deepen over time. Build an annual values review into your governance calendar — not to change values lightly, but to ensure they still reflect who you are.
And it means using values in hiring and onboarding. Every new employee and board member should hear the values as a conversation, not a recitation. "Here's what we stand for. Here's an example of a time we had to make a hard call based on these values. Here's what we'd expect from you." People who can't commit shouldn't join.
This is the challenge that sits underneath every other challenge in this series. When your values are clear, practiced, and enforced, your organization has a foundation that makes every other problem more manageable. When they're not, you're building on sand. I've spent the last 50 posts describing problems. This one describes the solution. The practical work of building values-driven organizations is the through-line of everything I do in Nonprofit Good News Premium.
Pull up your organization's values statement — if you have one. Read it. Then ask yourself two questions. First: could a new employee use this document to make a decision this week? Second: has anyone in leadership been held accountable to these values in the last year? If the answer to either question is no, you know where to start.
And with that, this series is complete. Fifty challenges. Fifty reframes. One consistent argument: the nonprofit sector is full of good people doing hard work, and they deserve better tools. My book, Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience, was my first attempt to provide those tools. This series is my second. The work continues.
This is the final post in a series based on the 50 challenges outlined in Appendix 1 of Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience (Wiley, 2023). Each post named one challenge clearly and offered a practical reframe with steps you can take this week. For ongoing coverage of nonprofit strategy, risk, and resilience — including tools you can put to work immediately — join Nonprofit Good News Premium.