Listen In: My Conversation on Nonprofit Burnout with A Modern Nonprofit Podcast

I recently joined Tosha Anderson on A Modern Nonprofit Podcast to talk about something I've watched play out over more than 25 years of nonprofit leadership: burnout in this sector isn't a rest problem. It's a structural one.

You know what needs to happen. Most days, the structure is not letting you get there.

We keep telling leaders to set better boundaries, take a real vacation, protect their calendar. All of that helps at the margins. It does not touch the real problem. The systems, staffing, and infrastructure an organization needs to function well often never get funded, because lean overhead looks responsible on paper. Someone still has to close that gap. Usually, it is the leader.

The problem was never your capability. It was the container.

In the conversation, we get into what I call strain masked by competence, the reason the most capable executive leaders are often the last to notice they are carrying too much. We also talk about why "capacity building training" so often adds weight instead of relieving it, and why fractional leadership works differently than a traditional consultant. A consultant hands you a plan and leaves. An embedded partner stays for the follow-through.

I also share what I now call the ANCHOR Method, an approach I developed after living this cycle myself for years before I found a way to break it.

You do not have to carry this alone.