Three Nonprofit Leadership Practices That Undermine Belonging

Why good intentions alone will never create workplaces where people truly feel respected, trusted, and able to lead.

If you work in the nonprofit, philanthropic, or movement-building sectors, you've probably heard the word belonging countless times.  Belonging appears in strategic plans, values statements, staff meetings, board retreats, grant proposals, and conference presentations. Organizations speak about belonging with conviction and it is one of the defining aspirations of our sector.

But the more I hear the word, the more I question whether people understand what belonging requires.  Because belonging isn't a statement of values or a communications strategy. Belonging is something people experience or they don't.  It is experienced through affirmation, respect and through psychological safety.  It’s experienced through accountability and the everyday decisions organizations make about whose voices are trusted, whose mistakes are forgiven, whose leadership is supported, and whose humanity is protected.

A year ago, I wrote about patterns disrupting nonprofit culture and sustainability.  The response was unlike anything I had written before.  People shared the article with colleagues, board members, executive leaders, and even college students because it gave language to experiences, we have struggled to explain.

A year later, I'm struck by how little has changed in the nonprofit sector.  If anything, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that many organizations genuinely believe they value belonging while simultaneously maintaining systems that make belonging challenging for people inside organizations to feel. That's because belonging is not built through intention alone.  Belonging should be a practice embedded in how an organization leads, communicates, makes decisions, recruits and develops talent and builds relationships.  It should be reflected in the everyday leadership that shapes how people experience the organization. 

Practice One: We Substitute Intention for Accountability

One of the greatest misconceptions about belonging is the belief that good intentions are enough.  Organizations often believe that because they care, because they have participated in DEI training, because belonging appears in their values statement, or because they genuinely want people to feel welcome, belonging will naturally follow.  But intentions do not create belonging. The organization's practices create belonging. 

Belonging isn't something an organization declares. It is the organization’s willingness to examine itself.  People say belonging matters, but rarely build accountability around it.  People celebrate the value without asking how it is being practiced, where it is breaking down, or who is experiencing the organization differently than we imagine.

If belonging is truly a value, then it deserves the same level of intentionality and accountability that we bring to fundraising, finance, governance, or program outcomes.  We establish goals, create systems, evaluate performance, and measure progress in every other area that matters to an organization. Yet belonging is often treated as something that simply exists because organizations believe it should.

Belonging should be examined throughout the entire employee experience.  It begins long before someone is hired. It starts with how candidates are recruited, interviewed, communicated with, and respected throughout the hiring process.  It continues through onboarding, orientation, supervision, performance feedback, leadership development, and ultimately how people experience everyday interactions with colleagues and supervisors.

Too often organizations focus on whether they hired someone who brings diversity rather than whether they have created an environment where that person can genuinely thrive.  Organizations often celebrate the decision to hire a leader of color, a woman, or someone from another underrepresented community.  Yet once that leader arrives, entirely different expectations emerge.  They are expected to prove themselves in ways others are not.  Their decisions are questioned more quickly.  Their confidence is interpreted differently and communication is scrutinized more closely.  They are asked to earn trust that others are often given automatically.

Most of these behaviors are not intentional and that is exactly the point.  People often have no awareness that they are holding someone to a different standard because no one has created opportunities to examine the assumptions, biases, and habits that shape how trust is extended, how authority is recognized, or how credibility is earned.  Without accountability, unconscious patterns simply repeat themselves.  The same dynamic appears in how organizations respond to discomfort.  Many leaders instinctively move difficult conversations offline. "Let's table this." "We'll discuss it later." "Let's take this offline."  Sometimes those decisions are appropriate.  But sometimes they reflect a desire to preserve their comfort rather than create a space to have a nuanced and deeper conversation to reach an understanding.

Belonging requires organizations to build the capacity to stay present in difficult conversations.  It asks leaders to make room for disagreement, uncertainty, and multiple perspectives without immediately trying to restore comfort or control.  It recognizes that growth often feels uncomfortable, and that discomfort is not evidence that something is wrong.  It is often evidence that people are learning together.

No one can ensure that every conversation is handled perfectly.  It just means organizations create space to fall short without being judged or even worse - cancelled.  If someone feels dismissed, excluded, interrupted, stereotyped, or overlooked, belonging isn't strengthened by pretending the incident didn't happen.  Nor is it strengthened by shaming or canceling the person who caused the harm.  Belonging grows when people have the opportunity to say, "This is how I experienced that situation," and when others are willing to listen with humility and curiosity rather than defensiveness.

In healthy organizations, giving grace and accountability work together.  And so the organization is building a practice of belonging when people know they will be held accountable for their actions while also being given the opportunity to learn, repair relationships, and grow.

Practice Two: We Protect Power Instead of Sharing It

The second practice that makes belonging impossible is the tendency to protect power instead of sharing it.  This is where I believe organizations reveal whether they truly understand what belonging requires.  It is easy to say we value inclusive leadership. But many leaders in organizations find it much harder to actually practice belonging once it requires them to distribute authority, trust someone else's expertise, make room for different ways of leading, and accept influence from people whose identities and lived experiences are different from their own.

I have spent more than three decades working in the nonprofit sector, and one of the patterns I continue to observe is how differently authority is extended depending on who is holding it. Some leaders are given the benefit of the doubt almost immediately.  Their judgment is trusted. Their decisions are assumed to be thoughtful, even when people disagree with them.  They are allowed to learn, to make mistakes, and to grow into their role.

Leaders of color, women, and especially women of color, enter the very same position carrying an entirely different burden.  As a Black woman, I have experienced this throughout my entire career.  We are expected to prove ourselves almost immediately.  Our decisions are questioned more frequently.  Our communication is interpreted differently.  And even having confidence is perceived as arrogance.  Women of color in leadership positions have to spend an enormous amount of energy demonstrating that we deserve authority that should have come with the position itself.

Over the years, I have spoken with far too many nonprofit executives, particularly Black women who have described traumatizing experiences.  Many have shared stories of being spoken to by board members in ways that were dismissive, demeaning, or paternalistic despite having decades of executive leadership experience.  They describe being interrupted, talked down to, second-guessed, and even yelled at. And then expected to absorb behavior as if this is normal.  

Often whenever experiences like these are raised, the response is often --"That wasn't about race."  The reality is that belonging asks us to consider what it is like to experience demeaning interactions from a board member or staff member as a person of color who has spent a lifetime navigating both subtle and overt racism?  To consider what it must be like for a Black woman to carry that history into a leadership position while simultaneously trying to regulate your emotions, remain professional, and avoid confirming stereotypes that have existed long before you walked into the room?

Belonging in practice is about recognizing that two people can experience the very same interaction in profoundly different ways because they have not traveled through the world in the same body.  Belonging requires us to make room for that complexity.  It also requires boards to think differently about what it means to support leaders of color.   The question is no longer whether the organization was willing to make the hire. The question becomes whether it is equally willing to share trust, authority, relationships, influence, and decision-making once that person arrives.

Overall, in the nonprofit sector power is protected quietly.  It shows up in who gets introduced to major donors, who is invited into important conversations, whose judgment is trusted without hesitation, whose mistakes are forgiven, and who is expected to continually prove they deserve the authority they were hired to exercise.  Therefore, belonging cannot exist if power remains something to be protected rather than something to be shared.

Practice Three: We Protect Comfort Instead of Embracing Curiosity and Courage

The third practice that makes belonging impossible may also be the most difficult to recognize because it often disguises itself as good leadership.  Most leaders want their organizations to be collaborative where people work well together and enjoy the work.  But somewhere along the way, many organizations have begun to equate comfort with culture, and they are not the same thing.

I have found myself thinking a great deal about the language we use when hiring and developing leaders.  How often have we heard someone say, "We just want to make sure it's a good fit?" Every organization deserves people who are ethical, emotionally mature, collaborative, and committed to its mission.  But I also wonder how often "good fit" becomes a way of protecting comfort because they do not want to navigate differences.  

Differences can be uncomfortable for some people.  Because it asks a person to reconsider assumptions they’ve held for years.  It introduces perspectives that may challenge the way someone has always approached strategies, implementation, and management.  It invites people whose leadership style, communication, or lived experience may not resemble another person's.  It asks people to acknowledge that someone else may see something that you cannot see.  

None of this should be a threat to belonging.  But unfortunately, in most nonprofits people have it completely confused.  Because the purpose of diversity was never to create organizations where everyone looks different but thinks the same.  The purpose has always been to strengthen how we think, how we lead, how we solve problems, and how we serve our communities. Diversity is an asset.  If every new leader is expected to communicate the same way, lead the same way, respond the same way, and make everyone around them feel comfortable, then belonging is confused with conformity.

Real belonging creates room for difference.  It creates room for disagreement that is grounded in respect rather than fear.  It creates room for people to ask difficult questions without immediately being labeled disruptive.  It creates room for leaders who bring bold ideas, challenge long-held assumptions, or move with a different sense of urgency.  Most importantly, it creates room for all of us to continue learning.

I believe one of the greatest barriers to belonging is defensiveness.  We can never stop asking ourselves whether our assumptions are fair.  Or whether bias might be shaping our perception of another person's competence, communication, or intentions. 

Overall, we must be curious.  We must ask - What might I be missing?  Curiosity asks whether I would interpret this situation differently if this person had a different race, gender, age, or professional background.  Curiosity creates space for humility and for growth.

Nonprofit leadership today and forever requires that kind of courage.  It requires the courage to be challenged without becoming threatened.  And the courage to welcome perspectives that stretch our thinking rather than simply affirm it.  It requires the courage to recognize that belonging is not about surrounding ourselves with people who make us comfortable.  It is about building communities where people feel respected enough to bring their full humanity, their lived experience, and their unique perspective to the work.

Organizations do not become stronger because everyone agrees. They become stronger because people are willing to learn from one another.

The practice of belonging asks us to … 

Exchange certainty for curiosity, comfort for courage, and familiarity for growth.   To see difference not as something to manage, but as something to value. 

Remember, the goal of belonging has never been to make us more comfortable. The goal has always been to help us become better leaders, stronger organizations, and more connected in our communities.