The mission brings people in. Culture is what keeps them — or doesn’t. And right now, more nonprofit leaders are reckoning with that truth than ever before.

Culture transformation isn’t a retreat agenda item or a values statement refresh. It’s one of the hardest, most sustained commitments an organization can make. It requires everyone — leadership, staff, board — acknowledging what is, defining what should be, and figuring out a path forward together.

True culture change is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time — a lot of it — and sustained effort — a lot of that too. But the organizations that commit to it don’t just retain people better. They build the kind of foundation that carries a mission forward through even the most turbulent seasons.

Start with three pillars

Before an organization can change its culture, it has to understand what strong, intentional culture is actually built on. In our work with nonprofits, we’ve found that the organizations with the healthiest cultures prioritize three things above all else:

Purpose. People must understand and genuinely buy into the collective vision — not just recite it. Purpose isn’t a values statement on a website. It’s the experience of seeing how your work connects to something larger, in practice, every day. Research tracking 59 factors influencing retention found that purpose had the strongest link of all, making employees 2.7 times more likely to stay.

Safety. People need to feel a sense of belonging within the organization — that they can raise a hard question, disagree with a decision, or admit a mistake without consequence. Without psychological safety, culture conversations stay on the surface. The real issues stay buried until someone leaves.

Vulnerability. People need to be able to show up as their authentic selves. When people have to perform or protect at work, they spend energy on survival rather than contribution. The organizations that make space for vulnerability — where leaders model it first — build the trust that holds teams together when things get hard.

When any one of these three is missing, culture fractures quietly. Long before it shows up in an exit interview.

Culture starts at the top — and that’s not optional

Leadership matters enormously in culture work — and not in the way most leaders think. It’s not enough to articulate the culture you want. Leaders must model the behavior they expect of others, every day, in ways that are visible to the people watching.

That also means accepting responsibility. If a destructive or disengaged culture has taken hold, leadership played a part in developing it, perpetuating it, or simply accepting it. Moving forward requires owning that honestly — and then being crystal clear about what changes, what’s expected, and what happens when people don’t meet those expectations.

Gallup’s 2025 data makes this concrete: manager engagement dropped from 30% to 27% in a single year. Managers are the primary transmitters of culture — their daily behavior shapes how staff experience the organization far more than any all-staff communication or leadership offsite. Executive teams can articulate a culture. Managers are the ones who live it out, or don’t.

Address the hard issues quickly. Reward people for positive change. And hold everyone — including yourself — accountable.

The three-step process: how change actually happens

People often ask how long culture change takes. While you may start to see movement within a few months, enduring culture change takes two to five years. It takes that long because change is based in the habits of people who are very accustomed to one way of doing things. People change when they see genuine benefit in the changes — not because they’ve been told to.

In our work, we use a three-step framework to guide organizations through transformation:

Step 1: Unfreeze. Before anything changes, the organization has to reckon honestly with where it is. This means assembling a brave culture committee — people at multiple levels with the credibility and courage to tell the truth. It means assessing the current culture without flinching, and defining both the values you hold and the culture you’re actually building toward.

Step 2: Change. This is where the real work happens — and where most organizations underinvest. Create a clear vision for change and communicate it relentlessly. Clarify roles and responsibilities so no one is guessing. Remove the obstacles that make the old way easier than the new way. Create short-term wins and celebrate them visibly. Measure progress. Hold people accountable — kindly, consistently, and without exception.

Step 3: Evolve. Culture change doesn’t have a finish line. The organizations that sustain healthy cultures are the ones that continuously reinforce expected behaviors, monitor how things are actually going (not just how they appear to be going), and make adjustments as needed. The work doesn’t end. It becomes the work.

Where to start: taking the temperature

You don’t need a formal engagement survey to begin understanding your culture. You need better questions — asked consistently, with genuine curiosity, and without an agenda attached to the answer.

The questions that reveal the most aren’t the ones on your annual performance review. They’re the quieter ones:

  • Is what we’re asking of you right now sustainable?
  • Do you feel safe saying the hard thing here?
  • What do you need that you haven’t asked for?
  • When did you last feel proud of something here — and did anyone notice?

These aren’t HR questions. They’re leadership questions. The leaders who ask them — and who can sit with the answers without becoming defensive — tend to build the cultures that hold people.

A few practical principles to carry into the work: be intentional about defining both the culture you have and the culture you want. Communicate — and listen, carefully, valuing the voices around you. Create safe space for brave and real conversations. And celebrate small wins. Say thank you. Reward people. Measure how you are doing.

Action must replace rhetoric. That’s the only way culture actually changes.

The connection to leadership stability

There is a direct line between organizational culture and leadership retention that doesn’t get discussed enough when organizations are in search mode.

A new executive director cannot succeed in a cultural environment that isn’t ready to receive them. A development director cannot thrive where recognition is scarce and burnout is normalized. Senior leaders hired into cultures that haven’t done this work don’t transform them — they get shaped by them, and eventually leave.

This is why, at The Strategy Group, we think about culture as inseparable from leadership strategy. When we work with organizations on executive search, succession planning, or board development, we’re always asking: what is the environment this leader is stepping into? What needs to be true about that environment for the transition to stick?

Those aren’t peripheral questions. They’re central to whether the work holds.

A question worth sitting with

If your organization’s most talented people left tomorrow — not for a better salary, not for a more prestigious title, but simply because of how it felt to work there — would you know why?

Culture is not fixed. It’s built — intentionally, consistently, and over time. Culture without action is just intention. The organizations that get this right are the ones that move from conversation to commitment — and stay there.

If The Strategy Group can help with your culture development work — or with the leadership and succession planning that surrounds it — we’d welcome the conversation. Reach out at info@thestrategygroupllc.org or schedule a 30-minute call. We are here for you.

Sources: Gallup 2025 Exceptional Workplace Award Study · Vantage Circle Employee Engagement Research, 2024 · LinkedIn Learning Workplace Learning Report, 2024