Some of my favorite moments in my consulting work happen right after someone says, “Can I just be honest with you?”. This is usually when the work shifts. Shoulders drop a little. There’s typically a lean in or an ease back right after a breath that signals it’s about to get real (or at least I hope so). It’s that moment in the relationship where the conversation becomes less performative and more human.
And that’s often where the real work begins.
Not because what comes next is easy. In fact, that’s usually not the case. But because honesty invites learning, and when we learn what’s getting in the way of people doing the work they care deeply about, then we can understand the shifts that we may need to make.
I was once facilitating a committee meeting comprised of staff and board members from across an org who were tasked to provide sensemaking to an org-wide culture pulse check survey. Together, we were reviewing survey responses and trying to better understand where and why staff and board were struggling in their roles. One of the committee members shared, “I think people are tired because they are being asked to carry out decisions they did not help shape, and they do not always understand why those decisions were made in the first place.”
That one comment shifted the conversation from interpreting survey results to naming the lived experience behind them. Suddenly, we were no longer talking about culture as a concept; we were talking about the everyday practices, assumptions, and decision pathways that shape how people experience the organization. We were talking about what happens when people care deeply about the mission, but are left out of the decisions that shape how the work gets done. And that is often where organizational development work begins, with a more honest understanding of what people are actually carrying.
Over my five years at NEW, one of the greatest gifts I have seen our consulting work offer is permission to slow down. It often feels as if leaders and organizations are waiting for someone to name what they already know.
Permission to pause.
Permission to think and rethink.
Permission to envision what’s possible.
Permission to be more intentional about moving forward, together.
This may sound simple, but in this sector, slowing down can feel almost rebellious.
Nonprofit leaders are holding a lot right now: political polarization, attacks on equity work, funding volatility, cybersecurity gaps, inequitable compensation, staff burnout, all with rising community needs. These challenges are symptoms of a sector being asked to hold more complexity, more harm, more community need, and more public responsibility than its structures were designed to carry.
Many of our inherited nonprofit models are rooted in corporate, colonial, and compliance-centered ways of operating. They often concentrate power rather than share it. This can default boards into oversight without enough imagination, strategy, or partnership. At the operations level, this can leave staff navigating unclear decisions, disconnected processes, reactive workflows, and unsustainable expectations.
So the work is not just about learning new tools. It is also about unlearning what these systems have taught us to accept as normal.
Many of us have been conditioned to keep cranking inside the system: move faster, produce more, stay professional, make the decision, get through the agenda, respond to the crisis, keep the organization going. And of course we do. The needs are real. The urgency is real. The stakes are real.
But when the systems were not designed for today’s complexity, and were not designed with the people most impacted, we have to actively and intentionally interrupt the rhythm. We have to pause. We have to rethink. We have to ask who is shaping the decision, who is carrying the impact, what values are actually guiding us, and whether the way we are working is helping us move closer to the future that we all agreed on.
That kind of pause is not always intuitive. It is a practice.
At NEW, our Organizational Development Consulting work starts from a different place. We believe organizations are living systems shaped by people, history, power, relationships, and context. We do not see strategy, governance, and culture as separate projects. They are deeply connected. How people make decisions, how power moves, how staff and board members relate to one another, and how values show up in everyday practice all shape whether an organization can truly move closer to its vision.
My own path to this work started long before I had the language of “organizational development.” Before coming to NEW, I spent my time working with young people, mostly teens, creating pathways for them to connect with one another and with the communities they were a part of. A lot of that work looked like coordinating volunteer projects with nonprofits in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Detroit. I spent evenings, weekends, and summer days alongside groups of teens planting and harvesting vegetables at Growing Hope, snorkeling to identify invasive species in our waterways with Huron River Watershed Council, completing home beautification projects with Avalon Housing, preparing and serving meals with CASS (Cass Community Social Services), and many, many more.
These projects led to teens asking powerful questions:
What does this organization actually do?
Why are volunteers needed?
Why are resources so limited?
Who decides what and who gets funded?
What happens when a community needs more than an organization has capacity to give?
These questions led to rich conversations, and those rich conversations led me to organizational development.
At its core, this work is about helping organizations create the conditions where people can contribute meaningfully, understand where the organization is headed, trust how decisions are made, and see themselves as stewards of the mission even if they don’t hold a formal leadership title.
I believe that organizational clarity and community well-being are connected.
When people in organizations are clear about their roles, how decisions get made, and how the organization’s values guide the day-to-day work, they are not left guessing where they fit or how to move. That kind of clarity creates steadiness. And when there is more steadiness inside the organization, people have more capacity to listen well, respond with care, collaborate with intention, and make decisions that better serve the community. Internal clarity is not just an internal practice; it shapes whether nonprofits can respond to real people with real needs in moments that often carry urgency, complexity, and consequence.
Innovation and creativity also have more room to grow. Staff and board members can shift from “We don’t have the resources” to “What’s possible?” They can imagine, test, learn, adapt, and build a roadmap toward the future they are building.
That is where I find hope.
I find hope when a board begins to see governance as more than showing up, approving reports, and following the lead of executives until something goes wrong. Hope shows up when board members begin to understand themselves as co-stewards of the mission, people who can ask better questions, share power, strengthen accountability, and stay engaged in complexity before a crisis forces the conversation.
I find hope when organizations approach strategy as more than a plan to produce. Strategy work becomes powerful when people are willing to ask: What are we really here to do? What does our community need from us now? What are we willing to stop doing so we can focus on what matters most? What future are we building toward, and who needs to help shape it? How are we going to get there, together?
I find hope in organizational design and culture work when teams are willing to look honestly at how the work actually happens: whose voices matter most, how information is shared (and with who), how conflict is navigated, how meetings feel, how people know what they are responsible for, what they influence, and where they need to be brought in.
There is hope in staff teams who are willing to name the values they are unwilling to give up, the agreements, behaviors, and ways of working that make those values real through meetings, decisions, communication, conflict, and care for one another.
I find hope in the leader who realizes they do not have to carry every decision alone. I find hope in the organization that begins to practice shared clarity about who holds what, how people show up together, and what it means to move the mission forward with greater intention, trust, and collective responsibility.
This work is beautiful, and it’s messy.
Values sound wonderful until they ask us to make a different decision.
Shared power sounds good until it slows down a process.
Strategy feels exciting until it requires us to name what we are not going to do. Governance feels important until roles, boundaries, and accountability have to change.
This is where the work asks more of us.
Often, leaders and orgs submit an inquiry because something isn’t right. They may want a fix, a plan, a retreat, a training, or a tool. And sometimes those things help. But organizational development is rarely about a single fix.
Someone once told me that we can only move at the speed of trust…and capacity. Trust takes time. Capacity has limits. People are tired. Organizations are complex. Internal and external systems are often working against the very changes people are trying to make. The hard part for me is knowing how much people want to change and also seeing how little capacity they have to do so.
The community has real needs, and those needs are often met through the services nonprofits provide. When nonprofits are not operating with clarity, care, and alignment, the people they serve feel the impact of that. They may experience longer waits, less consistency, fewer options, strained relationships, or services that cannot fully meet the complexity of their lives. That is painful. And it is part of why this work matters so much to me.
This is the work I keep saying yes to: creating enough space for honesty, clarity, and shared imagination to surface what organizations may already know, but have not always had the time, trust, or capacity to act on. I believe the people closest to the work often hold the wisdom needed to move it forward. Sometimes, what they need is a container strong enough to hold the truth, steady enough to slow the pace, and spacious enough to imagine something different.
So when someone says, “Can I just be honest with you?” I too lean in or ease back. Because tucked inside that honesty is often the beginning of clarity.
