A nonprofit leader I coach recently told me she felt like she was failing at a job she used to be good at. She wasn’t failing. The job had changed underneath her, and no one had named it.
Her organization had grown fast with new funding, new programs, and new staff. She had gone from managing one person to managing four, but her own workload had not shifted. She was still writing grants, delivering programs, and carrying donor relationships herself, which meant she was doing her old job and her new one at the same time with no more hours in the day than she had before.
What she was experiencing was not a leadership failure. It’s what happens when a role grows, but the organization’s staffing, workload, and expectations do not change with it.
If you are an Executive Director or senior nonprofit leader, you may recognize this on your own team or in your own role. As nonprofits grow, new responsibilities are often added faster than existing work is reassigned, job descriptions are updated, or expectations are clarified.
We see this often at EvolveTCF. Program Directors supervise bigger teams while still delivering programs themselves. Development Directors set strategy while still writing every grant. Executive Directors stay involved in decisions that other leaders on staff are ready to own.
None of that is automatically a problem. Plenty of people enjoy doing both leadership and hands-on work and do both well. The question is whether it is still working for the person and for the organization.
Research backs this up
A recent study of more than 300 managers and individual contributors found that 71% would rather spend at least half their time doing hands-on work than managing if the pay and title were equal. Even among people who were already managers, 57% felt the same way.
This matters because moving into management does not always mean someone wants to stop doing the hands-on work they value. A role that includes both can work, but the organization still needs to be clear about how much of each the person is expected to carry.
Growth does not just add more work. It changes what a role requires. When management responsibilities increase but the rest of the workload stays the same, the person is often left to carry the difference.
Growth requires the organization to evolve, too
When a nonprofit grows, it is usually intentional. You pursue the funding, launch the program, make the hire, and expand the work. What doesn’t always happen is going back and asking whether the roles built for a smaller, earlier version of the organization still make sense.
A supervisor who once managed one person and now manages four may need new performance goals, updated responsibilities, and a different way of structuring their time. They may also need more authority to make decisions, stronger support from their own supervisor, or someone else to take ownership of work they can no longer reasonably carry.
Growth isn’t only about adding more. It also requires noticing what has become too broad, too unclear, or too much for one person to hold and then being willing to change it.
Understand the actual problem before reaching for the obvious fix
Leadership development is valuable, and we do this work because we believe in it, but it isn’t always the right answer. Reaching for training or coaching before understanding the problem can leave the real issue untouched.
For the leader mentioned earlier, the answer wasn’t another workshop on delegation. The organization needed to build another team member’s capacity to own more of the execution so that she could step into the strategic role her job had already become. If we had sent her to leadership training instead, she might have come back with better delegation skills and the exact same overloaded job. Nothing would have changed, and eventually someone may have decided that the training didn’t work.
An overwhelmed supervisor might need coaching on delegation, or they might be carrying a workload sized for the role they had two promotions ago. A leadership team struggling with slow decision-making might need better communication, or they may need clarity about who is allowed to make the call.
The symptoms can look the same, but what is creating them can be very different. You cannot know what will help until you look beneath the surface and understand what is actually shaping the challenge.
Growth gives you a reason to look again
Nonprofits work hard for growth like this, including the funding, staff, programs, and ability to reach more people. That growth matters and is worth celebrating, but it also changes the organization whether you plan for those changes or not.
The roles and workflows that got you here may not be the ones you need for what comes next. When something that used to work starts to feel harder, that isn’t always a sign that someone is struggling. Sometimes it is information about where the organization needs to catch up.
If some of these challenges feel familiar in your organization and the solutions you’ve tried haven’t made the difference you hoped for, start with one role that feels harder than it used to. Instead of beginning with what the person may be doing wrong, take a closer look at the role itself.
Has the job changed? Does the person have the time, clarity, authority, and support they need? Is there a skill they need to strengthen, or has the organization outgrown the way the role was originally designed?
The answers may point you toward very different solutions. Before adding another training, tool, or expectation, make sure you understand what has changed and what the role needs now. Growth is more sustainable when the organization evolves alongside the people being asked to lead it.
Ronesha Jackson-Stanton is the Founder and Chief Leadership Officer of Evolve Training Coaching Facilitation. EvolveTCF helps nonprofit leaders and teams strengthen leadership, build organizational capacity, and create the clarity and alignment needed to serve their communities well.