It’s football season: a time when many of us are cheering for our favorite teams and analyzing every play. The more I’ve watched over the years, the more I’ve realized how much football-related strategies can teach us about nonprofit leadership. The same principles that win games — coordination, communication, and a shared playbook — are what help organizations advance their goals down the field.
I learned that lesson the hard way. When I first became an executive director of a fast-growing organization with multiple locations and services, the one word to describe us was more.
- More volunteers eager to help.
- More specialized training to meet new needs.
- More staff to coordinate programs across counties.
- More board members who could see the big picture and serve on committees focused on special projects.
Every decision to meet the demand for more and better services required even more of everything, including time, the one resource we never seemed to have enough of. We couldn’t make more of it, so we had to learn to work smarter.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I wasn’t just building programs. I was building teams. What I didn’t yet understand was how to build a team of teams.
One day, in desperation, I grabbed a notebook with dividers to track notes and assignments across programs and locations. This “playbook” gave me a fragile sense of control. Only a few years out of college, with no corporate experience to guide me, I thought my job was to manage and direct.
It took time to realize that my real job was to be the keeper of the mission, ensuring that we focused on our overarching purpose in every conversation, with every hire, and every decision.
Looking back, I can see our teams were organized by location and function. They worked hard and cared deeply. But we were like a football team whose offense and defense practiced on separate fields. Both sides were talented and committed, but we didn’t have a shared playbook or regular huddles.
Offense and defense in a nonprofit
Offense — advancing the ball:
- Program design and expansion
- Community partnerships and outreach
- Grant writing and fund development
- Innovation/pilots to meet emerging needs
- Advocacy and stakeholder engagement
Defense — protecting the mission and the gains:
- Finance, budgeting, and cash flow
- Compliance, accreditation, and risk management
- HR, culture, and workforce sustainability
- Communications and brand consistency
- Board governance and strategic alignment
- Data integrity, outcomes, and reporting
Both sides are essential. Offense creates opportunity; defense makes it sustainable.
What it looks like when we’re on separate fields
- New initiatives outpace infrastructure and staffing capacity.
- Budgets lag behind vision; cash flow gets tight.
- Mixed messages confuse partners and the public.
- Compliance and reporting become fire drills.
- Good people burn out because coordination comes last.
That’s where a team of teams becomes essential. It’s not just departments doing their own work well — it’s cross-functional teams that share information, anticipate transitions, and stay aligned around the same goal line. Growth isn’t just adding more people or programs; it’s connecting the ones you already have so they can move as one
Practical tactics to bring the fields together
- A shared playbook.
One page everyone knows: mission, three strategic priorities, annual outcomes, and 4–6 “must-do” plays (with owners). - Weekly cross-functional huddles.
Spend 15–20 minutes to ensure offense and defense are on the same page of the playbook. Programs, development, partnerships join with finance, HR, compliance, and communications to share what’s changing this week and what they need from each other. - Checkpoints for new initiatives.
Think of it as a timeout before running a new play. Each checkpoint signals the need for a quick huddle to confirm we’re ready to move the ball and that the plan, people, and resources are in place. No new program or project should kick off without an owner, budget check, staffing plan, compliance review, and data plan. Green light only when both offense and defense sign off. - Transition teams for handoffs.
When funding is awarded or a program expands, we activate a small, time-bound team (program + finance + HR + outreach) to shepherd the first 60–90 days. - Budget-to-mission rhythm.
Development and finance meet monthly to align pipeline, timing, cash flow, and reporting so we can deliver on the grants we win. - One scoreboard everyone sees.
A simple dashboard: services delivered (quality + reach), people capacity (vacancies/OT), financial health (cash/variance), compliance status, and 2–3 leading indicators.
If I could go back, I’d tell my younger self:
Leadership isn’t about keeping every play under control. It’s about keeping the mission in sight and helping every team — offense and defense alike — see themselves as part of the same game plan.
Because in the end, that’s how a nonprofit “wins” — not by outscoring others, but by staying true to the mission that brought everyone onto the field in the first place.
In our next post, we’ll close the loop with more on how to form our “team of teams.”
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If you have a question or a topic you would like to see explored in future posts, please reach out to me.
