If you lead a nonprofit, you already know your people are tired. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s State of Nonprofits 2026 report (May 2026) found that 46% of nonprofit CEOs say their own burnout is a major concern, up from just under 30% the year before. What gets far less attention is the layer just below you, where a lot of that strain actually lands.
Think about how your last manager got the job. Someone was excellent at the work. Program delivery, development, case management, whatever it was, they were your strongest. So you promoted them. Then you handed them three direct reports, a budget line, and a calendar full of one-on-ones they had never run before, and you hoped.
That is trial by fire, and across our sector it is the leadership development plan.
The Numbers Behind the Pattern
The 2024 Nonprofit Salaries and Staffing Trends report from Careers In Nonprofits and PNP Staffing Group heard from about 2,000 nonprofit respondents. Of those, 34% said they struggle to offer effective professional development and upskilling. In the same survey, 29% named turnover and retention as a challenge, and 59% said it had become significantly harder to fill open positions. I read those three findings as one problem showing up at three different stages.
The American Management Association’s July 2026 study, which drew on more than 1,000 professionals worldwide across industries, lays out the mechanism plainly. 51% of respondents said they were promoted into people management without formal leadership training, and 66% said they do not get frequent support from their manager. This isn’t a nonprofit-only sample, but it will sound familiar to anyone who has worked in one.
So we promote people without preparing them. Their teams feel it. Good staff leave, we go outside to replace them, and the cycle starts again.
This is fixable, and it doesn’t require a budget you don’t have.
Four Ways to Close the Mid-Manager Leadership Gap
Here are four options any organization can consider this quarter.
- Name what changes, out loud, before the promotion. The new job is not the old job with more authority. It is a different job: success is now measured by what your team produces, not what you produce. Consider having that conversation before the title changes, not six months into it. It is the cheapest intervention available, and most of us skip it.
- Offer a 90-day map instead of a title and a shrug. What are the three things this person needs to get right by day 90? Who do they need to meet? Which decisions are theirs now, and which still come to you? A single page is enough. New managers flounder most on ambiguity about their own authority, and that is something you can simply tell them.
- Connect them to someone who is not their boss. New managers rarely bring their hardest questions to the person who promoted them. A peer cohort, a coach, or a standing coffee with a manager at a partner organization gives them a place to say “I have no idea how to handle this.” Cross-organization pairings cost nothing but a few introductions.
- Ask the team, not just the manager, how it is going. We tend to judge a new manager on whether their projects landed. A more useful question goes to the people reporting to them. Do you know what is expected of you? Do you get useful feedback? Do you feel able to raise a problem? Those answers show you where to coach while there is still time to coach.
None of this is complicated. It is just rarely anyone’s job, so it does not happen.
The Bottom Line
Your mid-managers are the layer that determines whether your strategy reaches the people you serve, and right now most of them are figuring it out alone. A little investment here protects the talent you already have, builds the internal bench our sector is badly missing, and can keep you from paying for outside searches on roles you could have grown.
And, as always, if your organization would like support or a thought partner as you think through your talent and leadership pipeline, reach me at candance@nextgroupus.com, whether the answer is our talent network or not.
Building the Bench Together: The Impact Network
Closing this gap is one reason I cofounded the Impact Network, a peer-learning community for nonprofit leaders on Chicago’s North Shore, to tackle sector-wide capacity problems like this one. Take a look at our newly launched website at impact-network-ns.org, and consider registering your managers for our November 19 professional development session on banking and finance for nonprofits.
Sources
- State of Nonprofits 2026: What Funders Need to Know, The Center for Effective Philanthropy, May 2026
- 2024 Nonprofit Salaries and Staffing Trends, Careers In Nonprofits and PNP Staffing Group, 2024
- Ambitious Employees. Underprepared Managers. A Growing Organizational Risk., American Management Association, July 2026
- The Nonprofit Workforce is in Crisis, Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy, January 2025
