Hey changemakers,
Remember last month when I asked whether you might be part of the reason the board’s performance isn’t where it needs to be? Harsh, yes—and also the question that separates the leaders who navigate turbulence well from the ones who wake up to a full-blown crisis.
This month, let’s talk about what happens when a giant stumbles—and what a very public mess can teach even seasoned pros like you.
When Giants Start to Wobble
You’ve probably seen recent coverage about the Sierra Club, one of the most recognizable environmental organizations in the country. Since 2019, it has reportedly lost around 60 percent of its members and supporters, gone through multiple rounds of layoffs, and is wrestling with deep internal conflict over its direction and identity.
At the center is a question that will sound familiar: Did their push into a broader social justice agenda pull them off their environmental core, or was it a necessary evolution that outpaced their internal culture? The point here isn’t to decide who is “right”; it’s to notice how quickly a mission-rich, values-driven organization can become fragmented when change, power, and identity collide.
Leaders, staff, and members are all clearly passionate—no one phones it in at the Sierra Club. But passion without shared clarity and strong self-management can turn into something that, from the outside, looks like chaos: accusations of mismanagement, bruising internal fights, and a sense of a “downward spiral” just when external conditions demand focus and strength.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can be running killer campaigns, raising more money than you were a decade ago, and still be in real organizational decline. Metrics can look healthy long after the culture and cohesion have started to fray.
A Quick Lifecycle Check
Susan Kenny Stevens’ lifecycle framework is one of the most useful tools out there for making sense of what’s happening beneath the surface. She describes seven stages—idea, start-up, growth, maturity, decline, turnaround, and terminal—and emphasizes that the model is a diagnostic tool, not a rigid script.
Many organizations in the same position as yours are somewhere between growth and early decline: programs are established, the brand is recognized, and the systems mostly work—until they don’t. Decisions slow down, conflict gets more personal, and energy shifts from serving the mission to managing internal tension. From there, the trajectory is fairly predictable: either leadership and the board work together to redesign programs, right-size budgets, and rebuild trust (turnaround), or the organization slides further into decline.
From the outside, the Sierra Club looks very much like an organization at that inflection point. Whether it moves into real turnaround or keeps sliding will depend less on external forces and more on the choices of the people inside.
The Leadership Trap Even Pros Fall Into
Remember the classic cognitive trap we addressed before called the fundamental attribution error: when things go wrong, we blame circumstances and other people; when things go right, we credit our own skill and good judgment.
One of the hardest leadership moves is to ask, in the middle of a mess, “How am I contributing to this?” Not as a self-blame ritual, but as a disciplined practice. I’ve absolutely ignored early warning signs because the metrics looked strong and stakeholders were happy enough—and paid for it later in the form of breakdowns that, in hindsight, were clearly set in motion months earlier.
In Birth of the Chaordic Age, Dee Hock suggested that leaders should spend about half of their “management” time on self-management, with the rest divided between managing up, engaging peers, and only a small fraction on what we traditionally think of as managing down. For most executives, those percentages are flipped, and when the heat turns up, self-examination is often the first thing to go.
A Warm, Hard Look in the Mirror
Conflicts like the one inside the Sierra Club are rarely just about strategy memos; they’re about identity, power, and who gets to shape the mission going forward. Younger staff and members may be pushing for bold, intersectional approaches, while long-time leaders worry about mission drift, donor backlash, or losing hard-won credibility.
Your job isn’t to eliminate that tension; it’s to create the conditions where it becomes clarifying rather than corrosive. That starts with your own behavior: how you handle dissent, how you talk about risk, how willing you are to name your own missteps in public, and how much time you invest in aligning expectations before the hard decisions hit.
When leaders skip that work, organizations tend to spin in familiar patterns: decision paralysis dressed up as “thoughtful deliberation,” polite meetings followed by hallway wars, and a lot of talk about “them” (the board, staff, funders, younger leaders, older leaders—pick your group) instead of a grounded look at “us.” That’s the slope toward decline.
A 30-minute Reality Check
Here’s your very practical homework: take 30 minutes this week for a private lifecycle check-in. Using Stevens’ model as a reference, ask yourself: Where is your organization today?
Then ask the harder question: In whatever stage(s) you land, how are you helping, and how might you be unintentionally feeding the problem? Where might you be over-indexing on external threats and underinvesting in culture and relationships? What tough conversations might you be dodging with the board, the senior team, or rising leaders because the last crisis is still echoing in your nervous system?
If you’re not sure how to name your lifecycle stage—or your assessment scares you a bit—hit reply and tell me what you’re seeing. This is exactly the kind of puzzle I help leaders untangle in retreats and strategy sessions, especially when they sense they’re closer to that inflection point than they’d like to admit.
Because in the end, the giants that survive aren’t the ones who never stumble. They’re the ones whose leaders catch themselves in time to change their behavior—and, in doing so, change the organization’s trajectory.
Keep your eyes open (and your ego curious),
Kimberley
