Every nonprofit, even healthy ones, develops gaps over time. Roles drift, skills go stale, and capacity thins. These gaps can appear on the staff side, in the boardroom, or both — and if left unaddressed, they quietly slow momentum and weaken accountability.
This Field Guide offers a practical approach to finding and fixing those gaps before they start shaping culture and performance.
1. Recognize the Gaps on Staff
Most staff gaps don’t start as performance problems. They start as visibility problems. The signs are usually in the data and day-to-day patterns:
- Uneven workload: One or two people carry critical responsibilities that others could share.
- Incomplete reporting: Important numbers or metrics are missing because staff lack time or tools to track them.
- Role confusion: Job descriptions haven’t kept up with how the work actually happens.
- Low follow-through: Projects launch strong but lose momentum once the workload piles up.
- High turnover or burnout: Staff feel overstretched and under-supported.
How to respond:
- Revisit job descriptions and priorities once a year.
- Match expectations to actual capacity rather than to ideal workloads.
- Use short dashboards and check-ins to track progress, not just outcomes.
- Make space for staff to report when systems or tools are getting in their way.
2. Recognize the Gaps on the Board
Boards experience their own version of drift. It often looks like healthy activity on the surface, meetings, reports, motions, but the real work of engagement happens unevenly.
Warning signs include:
- Inactive members: Attendance and committee participation drop without follow-up.
- Lopsided skill sets: The board has financial oversight covered but lacks digital, fundraising, or HR expertise.
- Decision bottlenecks: A few voices dominate while others stay silent.
- Short-term focus: Discussions revolve around compliance and budgets rather than long-term impact.
- No succession plan: Officer roles rotate by default rather than design.
How to respond:
- Conduct a skills inventory to compare current strengths to strategic goals.
- Encourage participation through smaller working groups or defined project roles.
- Schedule regular “mission check” conversations separate from compliance discussions.
- Build an intentional pipeline for future officers and committee chairs.
3. Diagnose the Cause
Whether staff or board, most gaps share common roots:
- Role drift: Responsibilities evolve faster than documentation.
- Fatigue: The same people carry the load while others disengage.
- Skill mismatch: The mix of strengths no longer fits the organization’s direction.
- Information gaps: Decisions rely on partial or outdated data.
- Avoidance: Everyone sees the problem, but no one feels empowered to name it.
Recognizing these root causes helps leaders treat the issue, not just the symptom.
4. Treat the Gaps
Here is a short action plan for closing internal gaps on both staff and board teams.
Step 1. Make the Invisible Visible
Start by mapping roles, workloads, and participation. List who is doing what, and where coverage is thin or duplicative.
Visibility turns opinions into evidence.
Step 2. Clarify Accountability
If too much responsibility rests on one person, redistribute it. On the board, that might mean sharing officer duties. On staff, it might mean setting realistic priorities and delegating routine work.
Step 3. Modernize Tools and Training
Outdated systems are one of the fastest ways to create gaps. Boards and staff alike should assess whether current tools support efficient communication, data management, and donor engagement.
Step 4. Normalize Feedback
Treat data inconsistencies and missed follow-ups as feedback, not failure. If reporting drops off, it usually signals a lack of time or clarity, not effort.
Step 5. Review Structure Annually
Hold an annual gap review. Ask what roles are missing, which are overloaded, and where the organization’s current strategy demands new expertise.
5. A Note About the Executive Director
When an executive director is in place, boards often assume that person will handle every gap, staffing, communications, strategy, and even governance follow-through.
That assumption is risky. The executive director can coordinate and implement, but the board remains responsible for oversight, planning, and sustainability.
Shared ownership is the only structure that prevents leadership fatigue from spreading in both directions.
The Takeaway
No nonprofit is gap-free. What separates resilient organizations from fragile ones is how early they notice gaps and how quickly they respond.
Healthy teams, whether staff or board, treat self-assessment as part of normal governance. They ask where time, talent, and attention are missing, and they treat that information as a management tool, not a personal critique.
Every organization benefits from one shared habit: a culture of continuous review and adjustment. Gaps will always appear, but they do not have to grow.
Quick Checklist for Leaders
Use this as a quarterly gut check.
For Staff:
- Are roles and responsibilities still accurate?
- Does workload match available capacity?
- Are progress reports clear and current?
- Do staff have the tools they need to succeed?
- Are we listening when staff signal overload?
For the Board:
- Are all members participating in committees or working groups?
- Does the board’s skill set match our current strategic goals?
- Are meetings focused on long-term value as well as compliance?
- Is leadership succession intentional?
- Does the board share responsibility with the executive director rather than deferring it?
If the answer to any question is “not really,” the next step is not blame, it’s clarity.