When Your Nonprofit Team Isn't Performing, Start With Yourself

Most nonprofit leaders have been there. A team member isn’t delivering. Deadlines are missed. Ownership is nowhere to be found. And the quiet frustration starts to build.

Before you update the job posting, it’s worth asking a harder question.

Tiffany Slater has a phrase she’s known for in HR circles, and it’s not exactly a soft landing:

“People suck. And it’s our fault.”

As founder and CEO of HR TailorMade, Tiffany has worked with nonprofit leaders long enough to see the pattern clearly. About 70-75% of the time, she says, poor team performance traces back to leadership, not the employee. That’s not an indictment. It’s actually an invitation.

Because if the problem starts with leadership, the solution does too.

The Onboarding Gap Nobody Talks About

When a new hire underperforms, the instinct is to question the hire. But Tiffany points to a much earlier breakdown: onboarding.

Most organizations are so eager to get someone productive that they skip the foundational step of helping a new employee understand why the organization exists, what their specific role contributes, and how their work connects to the mission. In the rush to get someone “up and running,” leaders skip the part that actually determines whether they run well.

That’s just the start. Job descriptions are another place where expectations quietly collapse. Tiffany is direct about this: most job descriptions are just task lists. A long, well-intentioned inventory of things someone might do, but with no clarity on what results they’re actually being held accountable for. No metrics. No definition of what success looks like in the role.

If you can’t look at a job description and use it to evaluate whether someone is actually doing their job, it needs to be rewritten.

The “Definition of Done” Problem

One of the most practical ideas in this conversation comes from Dan Martell’s “Buy Back Your Time”: leaders need to be explicit about what “done” actually means.

Tiffany uses a simple example. You ask someone to order a printer for the office. They order it. Task complete, right? But your expectation was that the printer would be set up, connected to the network, and ready to use. They thought the order confirmation was the finish line. You thought setup was.

Nobody failed. Nobody communicated.

This kind of gap happens constantly in nonprofit organizations. Leaders assume clarity. Employees assume they understood. And somewhere in the middle, a simple task becomes a source of frustration on both sides.

The fix is uncomfortable in its simplicity: say what done looks like before the work starts. Not because your team can’t think independently, but because you can’t evaluate performance against expectations you never stated.

Accountability Has Two Sides

The conversation doesn’t let employees entirely off the hook, and it shouldn’t. Tiffany is clear that individual responsibility is real. But she draws a firm line around what has to happen before a leader can fairly hold someone accountable.

Have you trained them, more than once if needed? Have you sat with them while they worked through it? Have you documented the conversations where you identified the gap? Have you asked what they need to be successful?

If the answer to any of those is no, the accountability conversation isn’t ready to happen yet.

When leaders skip those steps and move straight to frustration or discipline, they’re not managing performance. They’re reacting to their own unfinished work.

Signs You Might Be the Problem

This part of the conversation is the one that stings a little.

Tiffany lists a few indicators that leadership, not the employee, is where the dysfunction lives. High turnover is the obvious one. But there are quieter signals too. Teams avoiding the office in hybrid environments. Missed deadlines that feel recurring. A team that doesn’t know who’s responsible for what.

That last one comes up often in Tosha’s work with nonprofit clients. When her team starts working with a new organization and basic operational questions go unanswered, like who opens the mail, who handles grant reporting, who enters data into the fundraising platform, that’s not a staffing problem. That’s a leadership clarity problem.

Roles and responsibilities should not be a mystery to the people filling them.

What Good Leadership Actually Requires

So what does better leadership look like in practice?

Two things stand out from this conversation.

The first is vulnerability. Leaders who admit they don’t have all the answers, who say plainly that a team member may know something better than they do, create an environment where it’s safe to ask questions and safe to say “I don’t know.” That safety isn’t soft. It’s the foundation of a functional team.

The second is consistency. Not annual performance reviews. Not a check-in when something goes wrong. Regular, predictable, documented conversation about how someone is doing against expectations they already know.

Tosha describes how TCCFO has built this into their operations through what they call a “success profile.” Every position is distilled down to three to four measurable goals and a set of attributes that define how the work should be done. That profile drives a one-on-one every single month. Same template. Same metrics. No guessing.

The result, as Tosha describes it, is that those conversations are almost always good news. Because when expectations are clear from day one and the feedback loop is consistent, people generally rise to meet them.

For nonprofits that don’t have the bandwidth for monthly check-ins, Tiffany’s floor is quarterly. Beyond that, you’re leaving too much time between the moments that could actually change someone’s trajectory.

The Mirror Moment

Tiffany closes with the question every frustrated leader should ask before pointing at their team:

“When was the last time I asked someone on my team what I can do to better support them, or how I can show up as a better leader for them?”

It’s a simple question. It’s also one most leaders never ask.

Leadership isn’t about having the answers. It’s about creating the conditions where your team can find them. And sometimes that starts by turning the evaluation inward.