I've been interviewing mission-driven leaders for the past few months, asking the same question: What's keeping you up at night?
When it comes to organizations with over $4M dollar annual budgets, I hear one answer consistently.
It's not funding, though that's always tight. Not strategy, though many are pivoting given the political landscape. Not even impact measurement, though everyone's thinking about it.
It's talent.
Whether you can find good people, what happens when you do — and what happens when you can't afford to grow them.
Finding talent: The management consultant gamble
The most obvious version of the talent problem is geographic. If you're building a team in East Africa and you need a director-level specialist — someone with, say, deep experience in social finance — you're often working in a market where that specific sector hasn't existed long enough for people to have spent time in it. Organizations I spoke with described being stuck between two bad options: hire someone locally with the right cultural fluency but no sector experience, or hire someone from outside the market with the sector experience but no contextual understanding, or roots; they’re likely to leave in a few years.
The workaround that everyone lands on: The management consultant gamble. You hire someone who is smart, analytically strong, and credible on paper. You hope you can turn them into the specialist you need.
Sometimes it works. Often it doesn't — because strategic thinking and on-the-ground execution are different capabilities, and one doesn't automatically follow from the other. You end up with someone who can write a beautiful strategy document and has neither the comfort with uncertainty, nor the “soft” skills, to implement in your specific context.
Retaining talent: It's not about the money
When leaders talk about retention, they almost always start with salary. We can't compete with government. We can't compete with the private sector. And that's true — to a point.
The fact is, there are organizations paying roughly the same salaries as their struggling counterparts, where people are staying and doing great work.
So the question isn't just about the number. It's about what else is on offer.
When those additional offers are missing, salary becomes the only thing people can point to, because it's the only thing that's legible.
But above a certain minimum threshold, salary isn't usually why they left. It's just the easiest thing to say.
And then there's a separate, slower problem that's easy to miss: the glut of directors.
One leader I spoke with put it plainly. They have high retention. From an HR perspective, that looks like success. But when an organization is not on a massive growth trajectory and senior people aren't leaving, there are no roles for junior people to move into. You keep promoting people, and eventually you have a lot of directors with nowhere to go. They're not frustrated enough to leave. They're just a little bit unhappy all the time. And that low-grade dissatisfaction is its own kind of cost — to culture, to energy, and to the quality of work.
Growing talent: Strategy mislabeled as overhead
Even when organizations can find and retain people, developing them is something else entirely. And this is where the sector's funding logic actively works against itself.
One leader I spoke with estimated that 95% of their investment in talent development comes from unrestricted funds. They've stopped pitching talent-focused projects to funders because they've been rejected enough times that they've given up — even though they name talent as their primary growth constraint.
Think about what that means: The thing organizations identify as their biggest bottleneck is the thing funders least want to fund.
So organizations quietly divert unrestricted money — the most flexible, hardest-to-raise money they have — to cover what is arguably their most strategic need. Except it doesn't get called strategy. It gets called overhead.
And that framing matters. Because when talent development is overhead, it's the first thing cut.
What would it look like to treat talent development as strategy — not an add-on to the work, but a precondition for it? I don't have a clean answer to that. But I think we need to be honest about what we're doing right now: We're asking organizations to maintain impact at scale while systematically underfunding the one thing that makes scale possible.
What are you seeing? Does this match your experience, or is something else showing up for you?
