These are three words I've been hearing lately when I sit with nonprofit leaders, not as separate topics but as three threads of the same conversation: conflict, compensation, community. None of them are new, but the frequency has picked up.
Conflict shows up first inside the team, most often in the relationship between staff and their own manager or organizational leadership. In one recent stretch of coaching calls, five out of six sessions centered on some version of the same tension: how to navigate conflict with a boss, and whether it was worth staying. The work of supporting clients is heavy, and the people doing it are already carrying a lot of emotion into every day. Being heard and supported by leadership is not a nice-to-have; it is what makes it possible to go back out and do the work well.
Compensation is another hard conversation that keeps coming up. Cost of living keeps climbing faster than most organizations' budgets can move, and executive leaders want to pay their people more but are boxed in by funding cuts, limited insurance billing, and market rates they cannot match. The honest version many midlevel leaders are living: I want to stay in this work, but I am taking on a second job to do it. Salary is not the whole story, but it has to be enough of one.
Community is what holds the other two up. Leaders need trusted teammates. They need people outside their own organization who understand the weight of the role and can speak into it. Across the peer cohorts I facilitate, that outside perspective is often what turns isolated uncertainty into confirmed direction, leaders realizing they are not the only ones navigating something hard. And they need real connection to the community they serve, because we were created to be connected to each other.
None of these three challenges gets solved by ignoring the other two. Leaders who are heard, paid fairly, and connected to people who understand the weight of it can keep doing this work well. That is what conversations with our behavioral health workforce keep confirming.