CLAIMS OF TOXIC NONPROFIT CULTURES HIT THE HEADLINES

A toxic culture is not just a threat to an organization’s effective functioning, but can cause huge reputational damage, as some of these stories illustrate.

•“Crisis Text Line CEO Ousted After Staff Exposes Culture of Discrimination”¹¹

•“‘Deep Regret’ Inside Aid Organization Grappling with Sexual Abuse”¹²

•“Top Women’s Rights Group Probes Claims of Racism by Staff”¹³

•“‘Bullying Culture’ and ‘Toxic’ Urge to Protect Brand Found at Amnesty International UK in Racism Inquiry”¹⁴

•“Review Slams Culture of Fear, Potential Fraud, Other Failings at UNOPS”¹⁵

•“Save the Children Admits ‘Unsafe Behaviour’ in Workplace”¹⁶

•“Audubon Society Hit by Claims of ‘Intimidation and Threats’”¹⁷

Most of these examples share a couple of important elements. One is the big gap between the behavior in question and the organization’s expressed mission and values. And the second is that in each of these examples, it was the leader’s behavior that was transgressive, or the leader stood by while their subordinates created a toxic culture. This raises the question of how an organization’s culture can ensure the accountability of all staff, from the most junior right up to the CEO. Key to achieving that is a culture of “psychological safety,” which we will explore further in this chapter.

CULTURE IS MADE UP OF NORMS AND VALUES

We’ve talked about culture being “how organizations do things.” More precisely, it is a “set of norms and values that are widely shared and strongly held throughout the organization.”¹⁸ Shared values define what is important to staff, and norms are the traditions, unwritten rules, and standards that ensure behavior is consistent with those values. For example, your staff may believe that diversity is an important value, but your organization also needs norms—such as a workplace environment that celebrates difference and recruitment practices that encourage diverse applicants to apply and feel welcome when hired—to translate that abstract value into concrete behavior.¹⁹

There is no template for fostering a good culture. Because culture comprises a set of values and norms, it can take many forms. And it will be heavily influenced by the priorities of leadership. Do you want a hard-driving organization, focused on achieving big results as quickly as possible (as at Crisis Group under Gareth Evans’s leadership), or one that is more inclusive and supportive of staff and more deliberative in its work? Risk-taking, or risk-averse? One where everyone has a voice, or more hierarchical? Or a mix? A number of studies, particularly in the corporate context (where most of the research has taken place), have sought to identify the values that are most important to setting culture. Those most commonly identified by companies and their employees include agility, collaboration, client focus, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance, and respect.²⁰

A nonprofit’s culture will comprise a mix of these and other values. A “hard-charging” organization or team may prioritize agility, execution, client, and performance. A more inclusive and supportive one may prioritize collaboration, diversity, integrity, and respect. We’ll explore below how the CEO can influence and shape their organization’s culture.

PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY AND HIGH-PERFORMING TEAMS

In addition to your staff as a whole, your organization may have a number of smaller internal teams, ranging from its senior leadership team to geographical teams or functional teams (such as your finance and fundraising teams). Teams develop their own culture. Ideally, these various cultures are all consistent and aligned with that of the organization as a whole—as that should certainly be the CEO’s objective—but it’s not always the case. Just think of how culture can differ between the senior leadership team and the board. Or between an office in New York and one in Nairobi, or the more internally focused finance team and the externally focused fundraising team.

Given the importance of teams to an organization’s effectiveness, a lot of research in recent years has focused on the characteristics of high-performing teams, much of it centering on the concept of “psychological safety” and a healthy environment in which people have the confidence to innovate and engage in healthy, responsible risk-taking.

CASE STUDY

Google’s Research into the Perfect Team

In 2012, Google set out to understand what made the perfect team, in an initiative called Project Aristotle. Google had consistently been ranked as one of the best places to work in the US, and its leaders wanted to maintain this status. Believing that having high-performing teams was key, they conducted an exhaustive review of the available literature and applied all their analytical skills to the huge amount of data available on Google’s staff and teams. They identified hundreds of its teams and tried to work out which characteristics were shared by the highest-performing teams. But they struggled to find common factors. Some of the best teams were hierarchical, while others were more collegiate. Some were diverse, and others largely homogeneous. Some socialized outside work, while others kept their relationships to the workplace. Some had more extroverted members than others. There did not seem to be any common mix of personality types or skills or backgrounds. Only when researchers started digging into behavior—i.e., “group norms”—did they begin to find commonalities between the highest-performing teams. The norm they found to be most important was that of psychological safety.

In its findings, Google concluded:

Psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk-taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members.²¹

Google’s research also identified other important factors to effective teams, such as the dependability of team members and the setting of clear expectations for them, but psychological safety was by far the most important.²²

The academic who coined the term “psychological safety” for team behavior, Professor Amy Edmondson, has described it as “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up. This confidence stems from mutual respect and trust among team members.”²³ It does not mean everyone has to agree with each other. In fact, this would indicate a lack of psychological safety, and that people aren’t willing to express contrary views. It’s not about being comfortable at work. Rather, psychological safety is about creating a culture of candor and openness.^*

To promote a culture of psychological safety, the leader needs to do three things:

Frame the work. Explain why the work is important and, even though this may be a given, encourage the team to focus on shared purpose. To frame the work also means explaining that outcomes are uncertain; there is potential for error in the work, and that’s okay—hence, it is fine to take risks. This encourages team members to take their jobs seriously and be more open in the way they approach the challenges.

Invite participation. Show humility. Team members won’t want to contribute if they think the leader has already decided on an answer. Ask questions and listen intently. Take the opportunity to openly acknowledge your own mistakes when you get things wrong. This lowers the costs to others of speaking up and reduces the fear of sharing contradictory viewpoints.

Respond productively. Acknowledge and express gratitude for contributions. Participation requires courage. Productive responses create a virtuous circle of participation when team members see that you are genuine about encouraging them to speak up.²⁴

In terms of leadership styles, a coaching approach is particularly well suited to encourage psychological safety. As Professor Edmondson notes: “If the leader is supportive, coaching-oriented, and has non-defensive responses to questions and challenges, members are likely to conclude that the team constitutes a safe environment.”²⁵

What happens when an organization or team doesn’t have a culture of psychological safety or, worse, where there is an absence of trust among staff? The most likely result is a dysfunctional team, even if it appears outwardly harmonious. For a start, staff members likely won’t feel comfortable speaking up for fear of being criticized or humiliated. Staff will play it safe and not take any risks. You’ll probably find a lack of constructive engagement, which may give an artificial impression of harmony but in fact reflects a fear of conflict. A lack of buy-in means members won’t feel committed to outcomes or hold each other accountable, and results will suffer. Often, frustrations will simmer beneath the surface, bubbling up in times of crisis or stress.^*

So how does a leader committed to building a powerful and empowering culture address these dynamics and put all of this theory into practice?

HOW TO BUILD A POSITIVE CULTURE

Creating a positive culture is a shared enterprise. Given that culture reflects shared values and norms, it can’t be imposed by the leader alone. A coercive leader can certainly impose a bad culture—one ruled by hierarchy and fear and an unwillingness to participate or take risks—but that will ultimately be destructive to a nonprofit.

While a leader cannot impose a culture, they are highly influential in shaping it. From the day the Freedom Fund was established, I’ve been deliberate about the culture I hoped we could establish collectively, namely one that is inclusive and impact-focused. By inclusive, I mean a culture where all staff members feel valued and safe to express their views. And by impact-focused, I mean one where everyone internalizes our purpose and remains relentlessly focused on driving positive change.

I’ve tried to model the behaviors I value. And I solicit regular feedback from staff—which in turn has helped me reflect on my own behavior and adjust it as required. I seek to give “micro-signals” to colleagues in our day-to-day interactions, making clear how much I value them and their input. I do this in meetings, and in my casual conversations and chats with them. I aim to show through the way I listen, and encourage and respond to challenge, that there will be no retribution for expressing a professional opinion. I hope to signal through my behavior that what is important is impact, not ego. I am very much a work in progress, but certainly, I’m better at modeling desired behavior now than I was back when the organization was first set up a decade ago, let alone during my time at Crisis Group. Here are some of the specific practices I’ve found helpful. These won’t work for every leader, and they are context- and leader-specific, but they might help you identify behaviors you want to model.

I have an induction meeting (in person or remotely) with every new staff member of the Freedom Fund. In that meeting I do four things:

introduce myself to the staff member;

ask about their interests and motivations in coming to the organization;

share with them the history of the organization (so we have a common understanding of the origin story of the Freedom Fund); and

talk about organizational culture, and why I see it as an important shared commitment.

With these meetings, staff are left with no doubt about the importance of culture at the organization, and their role in contributing to it. My hope is that this meeting helps create a sense of trust and accountability from the beginning. Now that we’ve grown from five staff in our first year to eighty-two, these meetings take increasing amounts of time, but I think they are one of the most important uses of my time, as they set expectations from the very start of the staff member’s tenure. One former colleague in Ethiopia noted after leaving, “One of the most memorable things for me is that you are the first for me to get a direct induction from the CEO in my more than twelve years of experience with five organizations.”

I hold quarterly “CEO calls” for all staff. Initially, I used this time simply to give quarterly updates, but I found that staff weren’t particularly engaged, and I wasn’t providing much that I couldn’t share via email. So now, on each call, a different volunteer staff member interviews me and is free to ask whatever questions they choose and to solicit questions from other staff in advance of the call. Given our staff work in twelve countries in a range of different functional roles, we tend to get a wide variety of questions and styles. I don’t know the questions in advance, which makes it all the more interesting, and vulnerable for me. Everyone is invited to join the video call, which is recorded for those who can’t join and want to watch it later. This format encourages me to be candid and open, and staff seem to appreciate the opportunity to raise questions about pressing issues.

At the end of the year, we encourage all staff to respond to two anonymized surveys. The first is on my performance, and the second is on the organization as a whole. These have the same questions every year so that we can compare performance year on year. They include a mix of multiple-choice and free-text questions. The results are shared with all staff and the board, along with my responses to the findings, including any action I plan to take based on the information received. The process is uncomfortable, as I feel quite exposed. But I think that the message it sends to all staff—that I’m willing to be evaluated by all of them, and value the feedback—is key to creating a culture of accountability. And over the years, the results have been positive. In the most recent surveys, the highest result was to the question “my colleagues are committed to doing excellent work,” which scored 4.54 out of 5. It was closely followed by “I would recommend the Freedom Fund as a great place to work,” which scored 4.39. The lowest response was on “I believe there are good career opportunities for me at the Freedom Fund” (3.48), in part reflecting the relatively small size of the organization, and very low turnover.

One of the more important things I have done as a leader is to build a close and cohesive senior leadership team (SLT) with high levels of communication and trust. This helps ensure we have rich and productive discussions, leading to effective decisions. During our weekly senior leadership team meetings, we often talk about the culture at the organization and ways in which we can build and reinforce it. We regularly share notes of these meetings with all staff, to demystify the SLT and share the thinking behind major decisions.

Across the organization, we engage staff in key workplace decisions. For example, when looking at flexible working in our London and New York offices post–COVID lockdowns, we polled all staff on their preferences. We don’t make decisions simply based on the number of votes, as there are usually other institutional factors at play, but we find the information highly useful, and a way of involving all staff in important discussions.

I personally engage with all staff across the organization in order to affirm their value and keep an open flow of communication. Pre- and post-lockdowns, this meant traveling on a regular basis to all our offices and program countries. During lockdowns, it meant scheduling one-on-one calls with each staff member, for each of the three waves of COVID-19.

I try to attend staff gatherings and celebrations. I want to show that I’m not exempt, disinterested, or inaccessible and that I’m interested in knowing staff at a social level, always within appropriate boundaries, of course. But I tend not to stay late, so there’s space for staff to also engage without the CEO present. No matter how approachable you attempt to be, you can’t avoid the fact that being CEO creates an inherent power differential. It’s better to acknowledge this than be in denial.

The motivation behind these practices is to create and sustain a culture of psychological safety, in pursuit of our organization’s purpose. They are designed for our organization and may not readily translate to yours. But the most important point here is not the specific behaviors but the value of being intentional about the culture you want to shape and influence, and identifying ways to bring staff along with you on that journey.

I’ve talked at length on culture because it is key to everything you want your organization to achieve. There is, or should be, a virtuous circle between your purpose and your culture, reinforcing each other. Nonprofits have a superpower: the motivating energy of a good cause.

A good culture helps you to be bold in how you approach your ambitious goals. It creates space for important discussions on challenging issues, i.e., issues that might elicit a range of perspectives and understandings within the organization. For example, if you don’t have a good culture, discussions about diversity, equity, and inclusion can become disruptive. But a good culture allows the opportunity to work through issues thoughtfully and productively, and arrive at outcomes that benefit the organization as a whole and advance its mission—as we’ll see in the next chapter.