by Dr. Kevin Dean, President & CEO, Tennessee Nonprofit Network
In the nonprofit sector, professional development is often treated like a mythical creature. We are fairly certain it exists somewhere in the wild, and we occasionally see brochures for it, but we rarely have the time or the budget to go hunting for it. Instead, we promise ourselves that we will look into leadership training or management seminars right after we finish writing this next emergency grant application, or immediately following the conclusion of the spring gala, or just as soon as we figure out why the basement storage unit is flooding again.
Consequently, day-to-day management in our world usually looks less like strategic mentorship and more like emergency triage. It is a supervisor cornering an exhausted coordinator near a malfunctioning office coffee maker to deliver a confusing, multi-layered message: The community forum last night was incredible, everyone loved it, but the facilities manager is out sick today so we need you to drive the rental box truck to pick up thirty folding chairs before noon. We operate in a perpetual state of putting out whatever fire is currently threatening to consume the breakroom, meaning that any structured investment in our people gets pushed aside to deal with the immediate, chaotic demands of the hour.
But treating staff development as an afterthought is precisely how organizations end up trapped in a grueling cycle of turnover. When we treat our teams as disposable resources meant to execute tasks until they run out of steam, we are actively designing a revolving door. Coaching is not a luxury item to be pulled out of storage during a rare week of administrative calm. It is a core operational necessity for survival in our sector.
Why Coaching Matters in a Nonprofit Setting
To understand why a structured coaching framework is so vital, we first have to acknowledge the reality of the accidental manager. In the nonprofit world, individuals rarely get promoted into leadership positions because they possess advanced degrees in human resources or organizational psychology. They get promoted because they were exceptionally good at their previous direct-service jobs. The reward for being an incredibly empathetic case manager, a brilliant youth counselor, or an organized volunteer coordinator is almost always a promotion to a position where you are handed a team of people to manage, accompanied by exactly zero instructions on how to actually do it.
Suddenly, the skills that made you successful in the field are completely irrelevant. You are no longer managing programs; you are managing human emotions, interpersonal conflicts, and workplace anxieties. Without a roadmap, these accidental managers usually default to one of two extremes: oppressive micromanagement born out of a desire to control an unfamiliar environment, or polite avoidance, where problems are ignored until they explode into a full-blown HR crisis. A streamlined coaching framework gives these reluctant supervisors a concrete, repeatable playbook. It moves them away from reactive parenting and toward actual, professional leadership.
Furthermore, because nonprofit budgets are tightly constrained by restricted funding and unpredictable donor trends, we rarely have the ability to use massive salary increases, spot bonuses, or corporate perks as retention tools. We cannot offer our best employees a company car or a corner office. Our primary currency is the workplace culture we cultivate and the genuine investment we make in the professional evolution of our staff.
When an employee feels like their manager genuinely cares about their growth, they stay, even when the hours are long and the pay is modest. When they feel like they are just a cog inside a machine designed to burn through human energy to satisfy a grant deliverable, they update their resumes and leave.
Finally, nonprofit roles are inherently elastic. Job descriptions in our sector are guidelines at best, and complete works of creative fiction at worst. A program director is rarely just a program director; they are also a part-time graphic designer, an amateur IT specialist, and the person who knows how to jiggle the handle on the third-floor toilet. Without regular, structured coaching conversations, that elasticity inevitably stretches into profound overwhelm and quiet resentment. Coaching creates a safe container to discuss boundaries, realign priorities, and ensure that the daily labor being performed actually connects to the mission rather than just filling whatever administrative vacuum opens up next.
To do this effectively without adding a massive, soul-crushing administrative burden to your already overflowing plate, we can turn to Marshall Goldsmith. He designed a lean, no-nonsense framework that requires no extensive worksheets or corporate jargon. It fits perfectly into our world of overscheduled, multi-hyphenate leaders.
The Six Steps at a Glance
Before diving into how to execute this framework without losing your remaining sanity, let us lay out the map. Goldsmith’s model relies on six straightforward questions that shift the conversation from a historical performance trial to a forward-looking strategy session.
- Where are we going?
- Where are you going?
- What are you doing well?
- Suggestions for improvement in the future.
- How can I help?
- What suggestions do you have for me?
By structuring your check-ins around these specific inquiries, you can cover alignment, recognition, skill development, and upward accountability in less time than it takes to fill out a standard, bureaucratic HR evaluation form. Here is how they actually play out in the trenches of a nonprofit organization.
1. Where are we going?
Answering the question Where are we going? in a nonprofit setting is a delicate, ever-changing art form. In a traditional corporate environment, the answer is remarkably simple: we are going toward increased market share, higher profit margins, and maximum value for shareholders. It can be plotted on a single, upward-trending line graph.
In our world, the destination is often an unpredictable dance between the strategic plan you wrote three years ago, a sudden shift in community demographics, and the highly specific whims of a major foundation officer who just read a trendy article about venture philanthropy and wants to change your entire reporting structure.
As a manager, your first job in any coaching conversation is to firmly establish the collective destination. If your staff does not understand the big-picture goals for the next six months, they will default to pure survival mode. They will focus entirely on the immediate, burning crisis sitting on their desks rather than the long-term trajectory of the organization. They will spend all their energy treading water rather than swimming toward the shore.
When you sit down with your employee, clearly state the current organizational trajectory. Do not foolishly assume they already know it just because they sit through your monthly staff meetings or read the board minutes. Connect their daily, grinding labor directly to the broader strategic priorities. If the organization is shifting focus toward a new regional model, explain the systemic reasons behind the shift. If the budget is tightening due to a lapsed government contract, be transparent about that fiscal reality. Establishing the direction gives your team a sense of stability and a clear north star, even if that north star occasionally has to shift slightly because a major funder decided to pivot their entire portfolio mid-cycle.
2. Where are you going?
In an organization with a massive corporate hierarchy, the career path is obvious. You start as a junior analyst, move up to senior analyst, become an associate director, and eventually transition into someone who wears an expensive fleece vest and uses the word synergy without irony.
In a nonprofit with a total staff of eight people, the organizational chart is incredibly flat. There is nowhere to climb unless someone above you retires, completely leaves the sector, or suddenly wins the lottery. If you casually ask a program manager where they see themselves going within the organization over the next three years, they might look at you blankly and say they are just trying to get to the storage unit to retrieve the clipboards before the afternoon workshop begins.
Coaching in our sector requires looking at professional growth through the lens of skill acquisition rather than title changes. If you cannot offer your star employees a vertical promotion, you must offer them horizontal expansion. You need to find out what professional tools they actually want to add to their personal toolkits. Do them want to master the intricacies of instructional design? Do they want to learn the dark arts of major donor cultivation? Do they want to learn how to read a complex organizational audit, or transition from direct service into public policy advocacy?
By explicitly asking this question, you are openly acknowledging that their current job description is not their final destination. You are signaling that you care deeply about their long-term career trajectory, even if their next logical step eventually takes them outside the walls of your specific organization. That kind of unselfish investment builds a level of professional loyalty that money simply cannot buy, and it allows you to creatively align their daily, mundane tasks with their grander professional aspirations.
3. What are you doing well?
Nonprofits are notorious for practicing the silent appreciation model of management. In this deeply flawed system, the reward for doing excellent work is simply being handed the work of the people who are doing poor work. If you are efficient, organized, and reliable, you are routinely penalized by being assigned the tasks of the inefficient and the chaotic. The only time employees ever hear about their performance is when something goes catastrophically wrong, like a glaring typo on page three of the annual report, a missed grant deadline, or a missing vegan meal option at the annual fundraising gala.
Goldsmith insists that effective coaches must explicitly, intentionally call out wins. In our world, we have to move far past generic, lazy praise. Saying things like You have a great attitude or Thanks for all you do is nothing more than professional white noise. It feels empty and perfunctory because it requires absolutely zero intellectual effort from the manager. It is the management equivalent of buying a generic grocery store sheet cake to celebrate a major milestone.
Instead, your praise must be hyper-specific and grounded in observable reality. Try saying something like: The way you handled that room of hostile neighbors during the zoning forum on Tuesday night was absolutely masterful. You kept your composure, intentionally acknowledged their frustration, and calmly brought the conversation back to the data. That is an incredibly rare skill, and your execution single-handedly saved the project from falling apart.
This type of granular feedback does two things simultaneously. First, it proves to the employee that you are actually paying close attention to their day-to-day labor, not just judging them based on their final output. Second, it clearly reinforces the exact behaviors, strategies, and techniques you want to see them repeat in the future.
4. Suggestions for improvement in the future
Goldsmith is famous for pioneering the concept of feedforward rather than feedback. Traditional feedback focuses entirely on the past. It is an autopsy of the botched catering order, the late budget submission, or the awkward presentation from last Tuesday. Because the past cannot be altered, modified, or undone, dwelling on it for too long almost always triggers defensiveness, anxiety, and a crushing sense of the dreaded imposter syndrome that already runs rampant across our sector.
Feedforward, however, focuses exclusively on the next time. It takes the painful lessons of the past and immediately transforms them into a constructive, forward-looking strategy. It assumes that the employee is fully capable of growth and redirects all conversational energy toward future execution.
For example, instead of conducting a grueling, demoralizing post-mortem on a poorly attended community workshop and listing everything the coordinator did wrong, reframe the entire discussion. You can say: For our next community outreach event in October, let us look at how we can restructure our digital marketing timeline. What are three specific things we can do differently to get our registration numbers up three weeks before the event launches?
This simple linguistic shift keeps the employee from spiraling into a pit of self-doubt. It completely shifts the dynamic from a punitive, top-down performance review to a collaborative, lateral problem-solving session. It removes the sting of failure and replaces it with an actionable plan for future success.
5. How can I help?
This is a dangerous question for a nonprofit supervisor to ask, because the completely honest answer from an overworked employee is almost always: I need an extra fifty thousand dollars in my program budget, a completely functional office copier that doesn’t jam on every third page, and an exact clone of myself to handle the data entry.
Since you possess neither the capital nor the scientific capabilities to provide those things, you must carefully scope this question to fit reality. This step turns you from a traditional, detached supervisor into an active, helpful barrier-remover. Your primary job here is to figure out what bureaucratic, logistical, or structural roadblocks are keeping your staff from performing their best work, and then use your authority to clear those blocks out of the way.
Sometimes, helping does not mean adding resources to their plate; it means giving them official, explicit permission to take something off. It looks like sitting down together, reviewing their overwhelming task list, and saying: You are completely underwater with this quarterly grant reporting. Let us look at your calendar and decide what projects we can safely pause, delay, or completely cancel for the next month so you can actually breathe.
It might also mean stepping in to handle a delicate internal political issue, clarifying a confusing organizational process, or advocating for their program priorities directly with leadership. When your staff sees that you are genuinely willing to use your institutional power to make their daily lives easier, the dynamic shifts from a standard supervisor-and-subordinate arrangement into a true professional partnership.
6. What suggestions do you have for me?
This is the final boss of the coaching conversation. In a sector that constantly talks about transparency and equity but frequently practices polite avoidance and conflict minimization, asking for upward feedback can feel like stepping onto a high-wire without a net.
Your employee is likely terrified of professional retaliation or awkward tension, so their default response will almost always be a polite, entirely useless compliment like, Oh, nothing, you are doing great! Meanwhile, you might be secretly terrified that they will actually be honest and tell you that your current management style closely resembles a chaotic mix of absentee landlord and manic energy.
To extract any real value out of this step, you have to create genuine safety for them to speak. You must narrow the scope of the question so they do not feel like they are being asked to critique your entire personality or existential worth.
Try asking a highly targeted question: What is one specific thing I could start doing, or stop doing, that would make your weekly workflow run smoother?
When they courageously give you a suggestion, no matter how small or minor it might seem, your only permitted response is a simple thank you. You are not allowed to explain your noble intentions. You are not allowed to justify why you sent that frantic email at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night. You are not allowed to litigate, debate, or minimize their feedback. Just take it, process it, and if it is valid, actively change your behavior. If your team sees that you can receive critique without getting defensive, you will successfully build a culture of true, lasting accountability.
The Sustainable Workplace
Coaching is not an administrative burden to be avoided, nor is it a corporate trend that has no place in a mission-driven organization. It is the single most effective tool you possess to combat the chronic burnout and turnover that threatens the stability of our organizations.
When you use a lean, structured approach like Marshall Goldsmith’s six steps, you strip away the stressful ambiguity of traditional supervision. You give your team clarity, recognition, future-focused strategies, tangible support, and a meaningful voice. You stop managing by the crisis of the day and start managing for the long-term sustainability of your people.