“We have a bit of a culture problem”, the Chair says during your interim CEO interview. You talk about team building, collaboration, warmth. You have been beloved by all your teams to date. You believe in your ability to give energy, care and challenge to build effective teams.
A few weeks later, complaints start to spiral and your inbox fills with unfounded accusations and grievances that are a major distraction from the work that needs to get done. It is at this moment that the real elephant in the room appears. Leadership matters, of course it does, but leadership alone cannot fix what happens when staff behaviour has gone badly wrong.
As a sector, we tend to focus on leadership when we talk about culture. In a crisis, leadership becomes the whole story. Boards focus on the leader who failed. Staff wait for a saviour to arrive and sort everything out.
I wouldn’t have set up Interims for Impact if I didn’t believe in the transformational power of good leadership. It is a necessary condition for success.
But it is not a sufficient one.
There is an elephant in the room that the sector avoids naming. Something is happening in charities, particularly in equalities- and rights-based organisations. I could be flippant and call it staff going feral, but that would belittle the depth of what is going on. It comes from pain, disappointment and betrayal. But that pain does not justify everything that follows.
Across numerous organisations, I have seen the same pattern repeat, in different places and under different conditions. I wanted to talk about it on my podcast so I reached out to Board members and leaders whom I knew had lived through it, but no one would go on the record. Whispered horror stories are shared between Trustees and CEOs, and I’ve had more than one client come to me, desperate for me to give them a simple solution to the situation.
Once you have been on the wrong side of a staff campaign, you understand why it’s kept secret. It is terrifying. Stick your head out and you risk being accused of betraying the very values you have always stood for. You risk being cast as both incompetent and morally suspect in a way that is difficult – even impossible – to defend. That’s too high a price to pay for most Trustees and most charity leaders.
Most quit. A cycle of burnt out and heartsick Trustees and CEOs leave. Sometimes things get back on track, but it’s rarely easy and there’s no simple answer. I’ve seen Trustees who specialise in these issues quit to avoid it impacting their professional work – even though you’d expect them to be the best at coming up with effective solutions. But they can’t because frankly, it feels like an impossible job. There is no easy answer. Solutions are usually long and complex and take more time than the average charity in crisis can afford.
These situations don’t appear out of nowhere. They almost always follow long periods of drift, inconsistent leadership or muddled systems. When rights-led organisations fall into difficulty, often due to a combination of inadequate leadership, unclear governance and financial pressures, and a failure to hold behaviour to account, they create the perfect conditions for a group of staff to weaponise values and turn their focus inward. In my experience, it usually starts with a small group. But, in a values-heavy culture, even a small group can be enough to paralyse an organisation.
You usually do not see the problematic behaviour reach its peak while things are drifting along. You see it the moment someone arrives and starts introducing some structure.
A new leader or Chair comes in. They see that management has been inadequate. They begin to make changes. Suddenly grievances appear. Not all of them are without merit, at least at first, and they often begin based on very real problems that started due to inadequate leadership and systems. There’s often a sense that now is the time to try.
But unfortunately they can snowball. If the aggrieved doesn’t get exactly what they demand (which can be extreme and unhelpful), confidence in the new direction is not only lost, but the new leaders are immediately bundled in with the mistakes of the past.
And the real problem is when the culture has drifted into an unspoken belief that staff are morally pure and leaders and Boards are morally suspect. Once this asymmetry takes hold, turnaround work becomes extremely difficult. Everything the leader does is framed as morally dubious. Everything staff assert is assumed as morally true. It is an impossible equation.
In my experience, it is most common in campaigning organisations, equalities organisations and charities whose identity is closely tied to rights and values. Everyday operational frustrations begin to be framed as moral failures. Grievances multiply, sometimes on the most tenuous grounds. Allegations become the currency. Accusations fly upwards. Staff position themselves as guardians of the mission while ignoring the actual problems facing the charity and its work. The moral temperature rises and psychological safety collapses at every level. As for the charity’s work and crisis turnaround efforts? Deprioritised, forgotten.
A former CEO of a major rights charity once said to me: “Campaigning is a frustrating business. They’ll rarely succeed on anything big. So sometimes, campaigners turn those skills inward, attacking the charity. When that happens, it’s extremely difficult to turn around from the top because you are automatically seen as the enemy.”
Boards and leaders may freeze at this point. They might overcompensate. They often bend over backwards to appease the loudest voices. They treat moral language as untouchable and staff demands as non-negotiable. Alternatively, Boards lawyer up and overspend charity money in a frantic race to get everything right. (And, as I always say, lawyers both make it more likely that you’ll win in court…but also that you’ll end up in court). Sometimes they go looking for a likely scapegoat somewhere at the top of the food chain. None of this is the right way to go about it.
They rarely ask whether the entire staff team shares these views. In several cases I have seen, these campaigns are led by a small group of staff who silence others by threatening them with moral contamination. Once the boundaries collapse, the behaviour escalates. The organisation becomes unleadable.
This does not usually begin as malice. In my experience, it begins with genuine values and belief. People join values-based organisations because they care. They start with hope. They are let down, sometimes repeatedly. Then things drift, and defensive routines develop. Chris Argyris explains this clearly: people under threat protect themselves through blame, outrage or avoidance. In high values cultures, those routines become moralised. The person feels entirely righteous, even morally outraged. They are the defender of rights and values, and feel entirely justified in whatever action they take. They genuinely cannot see the organisational damage they are causing or the boundaries their behaviour is crossing.
There are times when staff challenge is necessary. There are also times when staff behaviour becomes destructive. And some of the time, the two are true simultaneously. Legitimate concerns expressed in destructive, even harmful, most definitely counter-productive ways. The complainer loses sight of the impact they’re trying to have, and focusses entirely on pure, impossible principles. While, at the same time, they abandon any sense of their own accountability or obligation to meet basic behaviour standards or to act in a way that supports the work the charity is there to do.
The sector talks endlessly about leadership accountability and rarely about staff accountability. But staff also have agency in shaping culture. Staff influence outcomes. Staff can cause harm. Staff are full moral agents. They make choices. They have impact. Their behaviour can turn a struggling charity around, or push it over the edge. John Amaechi says, quite rightly, that culture ‘is the product of people’s choices. Some people are more influential than others but everyone makes a difference’. He also says ‘Culture is defined by the worst behaviours tolerated’.
So why don’t we hold staff to account for culture?
It seems to be that the answer is ideological. The charity sector romanticises staff. We tell ourselves that people who work for charities are morally good and selfless. We tell ourselves that harm always flows from power and therefore from leaders. We tell ourselves that staff voices are pure expressions of justice.
In many charities, moral identity has become fused with organisational identity. Challenging behaviour feels like challenging someone’s very sense of who they are. This mythology makes every difficult conversation feel dangerous. It silences Boards. It paralyses leaders. It gives cover to behaviours that would never be tolerated elsewhere.
It’s also about the complexity of the situation. The book Poverty Safari includes a few quotes that go to the heart of it: Asam Ahmed wrote “How do we hold people to account who are experts at using anti-oppressive language to justify oppressive behaviour?”, describing this as a “perverse exercise of power”. Author Darren McGarvey points out that “Any challenge to this form of activism runs the risk of being reframed as an attack on the minority groups or the abuse victims the campaign claims to represent.” Bailey Lemon laments that ‘the process of conflict resolution is in itself driven by ideology rather than a willingness to understand facts.”
If we care about mission, we have to drop the mythology and engage with that complexity. Poor staff behaviour in a crisis is not a purely internal drama. It harms service users. It drains leadership capacity. It destroys trust. It drives out good people. It costs much-needed charity funds.
I have seen more than one charity collapse under the weight of this, and I have seen the staff whose behaviour pushed one charity over the edge continue to campaign against the people who tried to rescue it long after the damage was done, self-righteous in their crusade and apparently completely unaware of their role in its downfall.
The answer is not fear-based management or a rejection of values. It is shared accountability and true adherence to those values. Leaders should be held to account for their decisions and actions and staff should be held to account for theirs. Both shape culture and affect recovery. Both contribute to success or failure. Strong governance requires boundaries that apply to everyone. And everyone should understand their role – and responsibility – to be part of changing the culture. As Amaechi says, “No one gets a pass to walk past the rubbish.”
As a sector, long before we face a crisis, we need better performance management. We need clear expectations, KPIs and appraisals. We need radical candour. We need the courage to challenge behaviour even when doing so risks accusations of moral failing. And we need to remember that accountability strengthens values rather than weakens them. Boundaries are not a betrayal of mission. They are what keep the mission alive.
We also need to understand and uphold exactly what our shared values mean – and what they don’t. So, when an attempt is made to weaponise those values, this is easily recognised and addressed swiftly.
For organisations that are already at this point, we need to name what is happening, and stop the silence, the fear and the pretence that any of this is in the interests of these charities or the people they exist to support. We need to stand by the leaders and Boards doing this, and refuse to be silenced by the fear of irrational condemnation.
Until the sector is willing to talk honestly about what happens when staff behaviour goes off course, resolving some crises will be virtually impossible.
Leadership does matter enormously. So do staff. Let’s not pretend we can have success without both on board with the transformation needed during a crisis.