The Assumptions We Never Question in Nonprofit Leadership

Last week I hosted the first Reimagining Nonprofit Leadership kōrerorero / discussion.

When I invited people along, I wasn’t promising a webinar full of answers or a shiny new leadership framework. My hope was much simpler than that. I wanted to create a space where nonprofit leaders could step back from the day-to-day pressures of their roles and ask some different questions together.

As I reflected on the kōrero afterwards, I realised the most interesting part wasn’t hearing about the challenges people face. Most of those weren’t new. We all know leaders are stretched, funding is tight and expectations keep growing.

What struck me was something deeper. Behind those leadership challenges are a lot of assumptions.

The assumptions we’ve inherited about what good nonprofit leadership looks like, what organisations should expect from their leaders, and what we’ve quietly accepted as “just the way things are.”

As we talked, a pattern started to emerge. Different people, different organisations and different experiences, yet many of us were carrying remarkably similar assumptions.

Some of them sounded like this:

• Nonprofit leaders should know everything.

• Wearing multiple hats is simply part of the job.

• Working well beyond your paid hours is what caring leaders do.

• Boards need every report, dashboard and paper they ask for.

• If something needs doing, the leader will pick it up.

• Nonprofits should always achieve more with less.

• Everything needs to be done.

None of those statements are written into anyone’s employment agreement. Yet they shape the way many organisations operate every single day.

The more we talked, the more I found myself wondering how many of these assumptions we’d stopped noticing simply because they’d become normal.

One example from the kōrerorero has stayed with me.

A participant reflected afterwards that, as a board member, they wanted to become much more conscious of the requests they made of their leadership team. They shared a simple example that I think many boards will recognise.

Imagine a board asks the CEO to prepare a reporting dashboard before every meeting.

On the surface, it seems like a perfectly reasonable request. The dashboard gives trustees a quick overview, it’s easier to digest than a lengthy board paper, and it helps meetings run more efficiently.

But then they asked a different question.

What if producing that dashboard takes the CEO another two hours every month?

Perhaps all the information is already sitting in the board papers or meeting documentation. The dashboard doesn’t create new knowledge; it repackages existing information into a different format.

If there are eight trustees around the table and each saves five minutes of reading, that’s forty minutes saved. The CEO, however, has spent two hours creating it.

From the board’s perspective, the request feels efficient. From an organisational perspective, we’ve spent two hours of leadership capacity to save forty minutes of board reading.

When you look at it through that lens, the question changes.

Instead of asking:

Would this be useful for the board?

We might also ask:

What is the organisational cost of this request?

I think that’s a profoundly different governance question.

It doesn’t suggest boards should never ask for dashboards. Sometimes they’re exactly the right tool. But every request has an opportunity cost. Every report, every meeting, every additional piece of administration asks someone to spend time they can no longer spend elsewhere.

For many nonprofit organisations, that “someone” is already the person carrying the broadest workload.

Right at the end of the kōrerorero, someone typed a question into the Zoom chat.

Does everything need to be done?

I’ve thought about those five words since we met.

Our sector has become incredibly good at adding things.

• Another report.

• Another initiative.

• Another funding application.

• Another partnership.

• Another committee.

• Another process.

Each one makes sense on its own. Each one is usually created with good intentions.

But we rarely ask the matching question.

What could we stop doing?

Not because it isn’t worthwhile, but because continuing to do everything eventually comes at the expense of the people holding the system together.

The more I work with nonprofit leaders, the less convinced I am that our biggest challenge is developing more resilient leaders.

Yes, sustainable practices matter. Good leadership matters. Professional development matters. But none of those things change a system that quietly assumes one person can carry the work of three/five/eight people.

If we only ever focus on making leaders stronger, we risk leaving those assumptions untouched. Perhaps the more important mahi is becoming curious about them:

• Who decided nonprofit leaders should wear all these hats?

• Who decided every new request should be added rather than balanced by something being removed?

• Who decided that working well beyond capacity was simply part of caring?

These aren’t questions about individual leaders. They’re questions about the systems we’ve built around them.

And I suspect that’s where reimagining nonprofit leadership really begins.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you could challenge just one assumption about nonprofit leadership, what would it be?