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Jeffrey D. Frey¹, G. Breck Wightman², and James Gaskin²
¹Rice University, USA, ²Brigham Young University, USA
Nonprofit leaders often enter their roles because they care deeply about their organization’s mission. They want to combat urgent needs, mobilize people, and steward resources toward positive changes in their communities. That commitment by the leaders is one of the greatest strengths of the nonprofit sector.
It can, however, also become one of its greatest vulnerabilities.
When the work really matters, it is easy for leaders to absorb more responsibility. A delayed grant, a staffing crisis, a board concern, a donor relationship, a community emergency, or a struggling employee can all feel like personal obligations. Over time, the pressure placed on the leader builds. What begins as a deep commitment can gradually become a burdensome overextension.
Much of the conversation about nonprofit leadership has focused on burnout – a real, costly, and deeply human problem. But burnout is often the symptom, appearing only after depletion has already occurred. In our recent study in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, we wanted to better understand what helps nonprofit leaders keep leading before things fall apart.
We sought to study the sustainability of nonprofit leaders and to answer very practical questions from the sector. Can the leader still make clear decisions when the pressure is high? Can they have honest conversations with the board instead of pretending everything is fine? Can they delegate without feeling guilty? Can they go home and recover enough to be useful the next day? Can the organization keep moving forward without every crisis landing on one person?
Our study examined sustainable nonprofit leadership through interviews and surveys with nonprofit CEOs, their spouses, direct reports, and board members, while also integrating organizational performance data. Across these sources, a consistent theme emerged: sustainable leaders were not less committed to the mission; they were better able to stay connected to the mission without carrying every need personally.
While the mission can highly motivate leaders, it can also deeply trap them into believing that rest is selfish, delegation is risky, boundaries signal a lack of commitment, and asking for help is a weakness. Over time, a leader can come to believe that caring about the mission means absorbing whatever it demands.
Our findings point in a different direction: sustainable leadership is not about caring less. It is about leading in ways that allow the work to continue without depending on a single person’s exhaustion.
For leaders, that means paying attention to the normalizing patterns, like becoming the default solution to every problem, making decisions while depleted, confusing availability with effectiveness, or only recovering after you have nothing left.
For boards, it means looking beyond visible activity. A leader who answers every email, attends every meeting, shows up at every event, and absorbs every crisis may look highly committed on the surface, but suffering underneath.
For funders and philanthropists, it means acknowledging that leadership capacity is part of mission delivery. Funding the work while ignoring the people required to lead it creates a very fragile system. We should no longer brag that every dollar passes through the leader to the mission’s needs, because when leaders are depleted, relationally strained, or unable to recover from constant pressure, the mission is affected, too. Supporting leader sustainability isn’t a distraction from impact. It is part of what makes impact possible.
For staff and leadership teams, it means paying attention to incentives and to what the organization really rewards. People will wait too long to acknowledge their burnout if overwork becomes the norm and exhaustion becomes proof of dedication. A healthy organization does not need to remove all the pressure, but it does need to refuse to make personal depletion the price of commitment.
For families and close relationships, it means normalizing the fact that nonprofit leadership rarely stays neatly inside the office. Spouses and families often absorb the emotional residue of the work. This does not mean leaders should be less committed. It means that leadership sustainability must include the relationships that help leaders remain whole.
For the sector as a whole, the challenge is to stop treating sacrifice as the clearest evidence of mission commitment. Nonprofit work will always involve pressure, as many organizations have limited resources, complex stakeholder demands, and urgent community needs, but if the sector depends on leaders being depleted to prove they care, then the model itself needs to be reevaluated.
The implications are straightforward. CEOs need to recognize that sustainability is not accidental. There are observable differences between leaders who remain well and effective and those who become depleted, and there are practical steps CEOs can take to make their work more sustainable. Boards need to stop rewarding nonstop availability as the main sign of commitment. Funders need to recognize that leadership capacity is part of mission delivery. Leadership development programs need to teach leaders how to build renewal, relationships, and role clarity into the work itself. Organizations need to protect their mission without building a culture in which exhaustion becomes the price of caring.
Burnout prevention remains important, but nonprofit leaders need more than strategies for surviving the work. Nonprofit leaders need systems that help them stay connected to their purpose, be supported in their relationships, and lead well over time.
The future of nonprofit leadership cannot rest on individual endurance alone. If we want sustainable missions, we need sustainable leaders. And if we want sustainable leaders, the responsibility lies not only with executives themselves but also with the boards, funders, teams, families, and communities that shape the conditions in which leadership occurs.
Click here to read the free full-text article: Frey, J. D., Wightman, G. B., & Gaskin, J. (2026). Beyond Burnout: Determinants and Consequences of Sustainable Nonprofit Leadership. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 0(0)
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