Fall 2026 Issue

The Leadership Affect
By Sue Coyle, MSW
Social Work Today
Vol. 26 No. 4 P. 18

Nonprofit and social service leadership can either mitigate or exacerbate challenges in the workplace.

What brings an applicant to a job? At a nonprofit or other social service setting, and in an ideal job market, it’s the mission, the population served, and the services provided. Social workers, when able, choose organizations and positions that align with their passions and their skill sets. A clinically focused social worker may look for case management or therapy, for example, while a macro social worker will apply to advocacy and other similar positions. It is all rather straightforward.

The more complicated question, then, is what keeps an employee at an organization? As a hint, it is not the mission or the population served, at least not in the long run.

Employee retention is a complicated issue, impacted by multiple factors, but the one that stands out most is leadership. “Research has found,” says Monisha Kapila, MBA, founder and principal of Leadership by Purpose LLC and adjunct faculty at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., “that people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers.”

In fact, a recent survey found that 28% of respondents cited leadership as the reason they left, and the opposite is also true. Leadership can be the reason people stay. That same survey found that “Under a good manager and a great leader, employee commitment to stay is at its highest point—94%. However, with a poor leader, even good managers see the commitment of their people to stay dropping to 35%.”1

Leaders are a vital part of an organization, impacting not just employee retention but other internal challenges and external organizational relationships. Understanding the role leadership plays in a nonprofit and other social service settings and what positive leadership entails is the first step in becoming and remaining a great leader.

Internal Challenges
Nonprofits face numerous challenges within the workplace, including, as aforementioned, employee retention. While it is true that organizations in all sectors struggle with retention at times, nonprofits do so at a higher rate. Turnover in nonprofits is estimated at approximately 20% to 22% annually. Other sectors see a rate of 12% to 13%.

Such high turnover contributes to other common nonprofit challenges, such as imbalanced workloads. “Some of the biggest obstacles that nonprofits are facing [include] chronic vacancy, where the work doesn’t shrink with the staff. If there are vacancies or openings, the work ends up getting redistributed to whoever is still standing,” explains Sheila Weber, MSW, MBA, LCSW-PIP, founder and principal of HomeGrown Strategies, LLC, in Madison County, Alabama.

Not only does the work not shrink, but the pay typically does not grow. Lavonzell Nicholson, MSW, principal of EIH Consulting, based in New Orleans, notes that while it is still considered taboo to discuss in many organizations and sectors, competitive pay, along with recruiting, retention, and workload, is a significant issue nonprofit organizations struggle to address. And not talking about it—failing to communicate meaningfully about it—is one of the biggest mistakes that leaders make.

That is true for all of the challenges described as well as others not mentioned. Less effective leaders tend to shy away from the difficult conversations they require. This could, in part, be because there are no easy solutions. For example, pay increases at a nonprofit are not simply achieved by the organization even when the individual has more than earned them. “Compensation often gets constrained by funders and contracts, not by the organization’s or the leader’s willingness. That’s a real constraint because nonprofits aren’t [like for-profits]. In general, in a for-profit business, if you want to raise staff salaries, you have to raise your prices. Nonprofits can’t just raise their prices,” Weber says.

“The other piece is grant-cycle instability. It makes permanent community needs, permanent needs that the organizations are there to support, feel like temporary jobs, so that also contributes to turnover because you don’t know funding from year to year. You get caught in this cycle of unknowns,” she describes.

“We have conditions that are structural,” Nicholson adds. “We need to raise money to provide services, and ultimately leaders control how they communicate those constraints to staff, so when we talk about issues nonprofit and social service organization leaders are dealing with, it’s those big topic things. [Leaders] can think about how to mitigate those ambiguities—are you articulating what workloads are? Are you being transparent about your salaries in job postings? Do you address burnout? Are you making space for people to rest and restore? Are you modeling that as a leader?”

Unfortunately, many leaders are not doing any of that and, instead of mitigating the obstacles, they are exacerbating them. In doing so, the internal challenges not only negatively affect the inner workings of the organization—creating a consistent, if not constant, cycle of turnover, high workload, low pay, burnout—but also the relationships that organizations have with clients, stakeholders, and others.

External Impact
In direct service settings, instability within the workplace affects the clients served. Take, for example, a behavioral health organization. When staff turnover is high year over year, clients are not seeing one person consistently. Instead, they are having to start over again and again, placing the burden on them to continually redescribe their concerns, symptoms, and potentially traumas to a new clinician. This impacts client retention and progress.

For instance, a study published in 2018 that followed outpatient clients from 2013 to 2016 found that “Youth who experienced therapist turnover were 86% more likely to miss a future scheduled therapy session.”2

Findings are similar in case management and other direct service settings. Casey Family Programs notes that “Staff turnover has been associated with more placement disruptions, time in foster care, incidents of maltreatment, and reentries into foster care. Research suggests that casework turnover is frequent, often abrupt, and constitutes a relationship loss with children that has complex and negative impacts on children’s well-being.”3

Nonprofits that do not provide direct service also experience external repercussions when the inner workings are struggling. “The impact may be less immediately visible in a macro-focused organization, but it is no less significant,” stresses Jill Davis, Shatterproof chief development officer. Shatterproof is a national nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on the addiction crisis in the United States through advocacy, education, policy change, and working to transform the health care system.

“Organizations like Shatterproof depend heavily on relationships with donors, corporate partners, policymakers, advocates, volunteers, people with lived experience, and many others. I think about those relationships as relationship capital: the trust, credibility, and connection an organization builds over time. When turnover is high, or teams are stretched too thin, you risk losing not only capacity, but institutional knowledge, continuity, and relationships that may have taken years to develop,” she says.

And it’s not just turnover and overworked employees that stress the external relationships. Poor communication from all levels of leadership within can lead to muddled messaging.

“External relationships are a mirror of internal relationships. Clients, funders, and partners—whether we are intentional about it or not—can experience us the same way as we experience it internally,” Nicholson says. “On a macro level, we’re communicating the why behind our mission. Clients who come into our organization or members of the community who come into the organization and aren’t getting the same message from the executive director that they are getting from the program director or from the coordinator, they feel that.

“If it is not clear internally, it can be unclear externally,” Nicholson states.

Positive Leadership: Communication
Addressing those internal challenges and, as a result, improving external relationships falls to the leaders. As noted, there is no simple fix. Systemic and structural factors affect the way in which a nonprofit or social service setting can function. However, a leader or leaders can help to work through those challenges and make the workplace a more sustainable and long-term choice in a social worker’s career. The number one tool to do that is communication.

“One of my core leadership beliefs is that clarity builds trust,” Davis says. “Effective leadership is about creating the conditions for people to do their best work, and that starts with clarity about where we are going, why it matters, what success looks like, and how each person contributes. But it also requires empathy, accountability, curiosity, and a willingness to listen and adapt.

“Effective communication is what turns that clarity into connection. I don’t think of communication simply as sharing information. At its best, communication helps people understand not only what is happening but why and gives them an opportunity to see themselves in where the organization is headed,” she continues.

Kapila adds, “Regular, honest, two-way communication builds trust and reduces the anxiety that heavy caseloads and mission-critical work already create. Staff who feel valued, informed, and heard are more resilient even when the work itself is hard.”

What does that communication look like? For starters, it is happening at all levels, not just from the very top or the very middle of management, and it goes in both directions. The highest-level nonprofit leader is communicating honestly and as appropriate about the organization, and the leaders at all other levels are continuing that communication while also having the space to communicate up additional questions, concerns, and information. And all parties are taking the time to receive and respond to what they hear. After all, communication is not just talking (or sharing a memo); it requires listening, as well.

“A few really good communication skills are actually telling the people in the middle, helping them understand first before a message gets relayed about maybe a decision that they didn’t get to fully participate in but they’re having to go back to their teams and relay—giving them time up front to share the information with them, help them understand, answer their questions, and also be open to things that maybe as organizational leadership you hadn’t thought about or considered,” says Weber, further stressing that “Including them in decision making as much as possible is a really helpful skill but also when a decision has been made, really briefing them well, and also giving them clarity of what is yours to just know because you’re in this middle management position and what is yours to pass on. We often don’t tell people what they’re allowed to share or supposed to share.”

She stresses that the way in which something is shared is important, as well. Not everything can be an email or a text. Some information requires in-person conversations, either one-on-one or as a group.

Additionally, it is vital that the same level of clear communication is maintained in calm and choppy waters alike. Crises are not a time to close doors and shut off conversations. “The single biggest mistake is under-communicating in higher stress situations. When people are experiencing uncertainty, they need information to manage their stress. Without it, silence gets filled with fear and speculation. Leaders often wait to communicate because they don’t have complete information. Sharing what you know, what you don’t know, and when you’ll follow up builds more trust than waiting for a perfect, complete message,” Kapila says.

Additional Leadership Principles
Communication is, of course, just one piece of the puzzle, albeit a very large one. Hand in hand with it is teamwork. Decisions about an organization, its services and its people cannot and should not be made in a silo. No one leader can successfully run an organization and effectively mitigate the structural issues within nonprofits alone.

Weber jokes that when thinking about nonprofit culture, she is often reminded of the eldest daughter memes circulating online. The eldest daughter, according to the memes, takes on more responsibility than other siblings, does everything herself, and refuses to ask for help. Nonprofit leaders have a tendency to do the same thing, and “When we do that, we’re not only doing a disservice to ourselves, but we’re doing a disservice for what we’re modeling to other people too. For this work to be sustainable in the long haul, we need to model that it’s also okay to have help and thought partnership and not have all the answers, too.”

Teamwork, of course, works best when leaders recognize that the other individuals within the organization—whether leaders as well or not—are people, first and foremost. Their opinions are valuable, their voices should be heard, and their needs should be met to the degree possible. This requires a few things. First, intentionality. “We have to be as intentional about doing the work out in the community as we are intentional in doing the work inside our organization. As passionate as we are about our clients and our advocacy work, we have to be as passionate about the people who are in our organizations,” Nicholson says.

In doing so, leaders have to remember to look past the mission—not forget about it or minimize it, but remember that it is one part of the whole. “People are often deeply connected to the mission, which is one of our greatest strengths. But that commitment can also make it easier to normalize unsustainable workloads or expectations,” Davis says. “We have to resist the idea that dedication to the mission means continually doing more with less.”

Nicholson adds, “I think that if you lean only on the mission, you’re missing the opportunity to strengthen your staff skillset, your culture. You’re missing the opportunity to create the conditions to do even better work within the community, and you’re missing the real reality that we are all human beings living a human experience.”

Finding Support
It is a tall order, especially for new leaders and/or for organizations looking to change, improve, or transition their leadership. Becoming a great leader requires all of the same things being a great leader does: communication, teamwork, and a people-forward focus. Sometimes, that gets missed.

For organizations, realizing that means assessing the way leaders are onboarded, whether they are new to a nonprofit or being promoted. “The training new supervisors get is mostly technical: policies, procedures, documentation, the approval chain, the duties of the role. None of it is wrong, and all of it is necessary. [However], it is just part of what they need. What they get far less of is preparation for the actual work of leading people, which is communication, developing a team, managing performance, leading through change, staying resilient, and holding a direction. The gap isn’t a personal deficiency. It’s what our sector does,” Weber says.

For the individuals, it means learning how to ask for and look externally when needed for that training. Weber holds a nine-month cohort for midlevel nonprofit leaders called Confidare, for example.

It also requires recognizing one’s weaknesses and strengths. Many social workers are promoted because of the work they are doing in direct service. Direct service is not the same as program leadership. That’s not to say those skills can’t be used in leadership. Nicholson points to meeting people where they are as a firm foundation in both leadership and social work practice. They can, but they are not the only skills a leader needs. Recognizing how one’s skills translate and which skills are still needed can help a social worker transition into effective leadership.

“You don’t need an MBA. You don’t need a business degree, but do you need to learn about budgeting? We all have something to learn. Nobody brings the whole package,” Nicholson says.

But, she affirms, “Just know that I do believe social workers make great leaders.”

— Sue Coyle, MSW, is a freelance writer and social worker in the Philadelphia suburbs.

References
1. Brockhoff A. Follow the leader: why retention is directly linked to leadership quality. Forbes Australia website. Published February 3, 2025. https://www.forbes.com.au/news/leadership/why-retention-is-directly-linked-to-leadership-quality/.

2. Babbar S, Adams DR, Becker-Haimes EM, et al. Therapist turnover and client non-attendance. Child Youth Serv Rev. 2018;93:12-16.

3. How does turnover in the child welfare workforce impact children and families? Casey Family Programs website. https://www.casey.org/turnover-costs-and-retention-strategies/. Published August 29, 2023.