You Can’t Build Culture in Crisis Mode

Are you constantly putting out fires?
Spending more time holding space for concerns than building systems to prevent them?

You’re not alone and you’re not failing. But if this feels familiar, your organization might be operating in reaction mode, which is unsustainable.

At Fearless Spaces, we work with mission-driven teams navigating big emotions, high expectations, and the very real challenges that come with doing people-centered work, especially without the internal infrastructure to support it. And here’s the truth: a lot of us weren’t taught how to build internal systems rooted in care, clarity, and accountability.

Whether your team is five people or fifty, you’re bringing together a complex web of lived experiences, identities, and ways of being in the world. Along with that comes the full spectrum of human behavior: our brilliance, our biases, our triggers, and our trauma.

All of that creates what we like to call the workplace petri dish.
Climate is how it feels to be there.
Culture is what you do when no one’s looking.
When climate and culture are out of sync, instability grows.

One challenge we see time after time is that leaders want to listen, but they’re exhausted. The feedback feels nonstop. Every week it’s something new. And it gets even trickier when there’s no designated person to manage team dynamics.

Only 61% of nonprofits with payroll over $1M have at least one dedicated HR professional on their team. Let that land. Within that other 39%, that’s a lot of listening, reacting, and mediating falling on folks who are already stretched thin.

Here’s what you risk when you stay in reaction mode:

• You miss patterns and the systems that could grow from them.

• It becomes harder to tell when feedback is a signal… or just noise.

• You can’t see the deeper equity and accountability gaps in your ecosystem.

• Your team loses trust in the process.

• And the cycle repeats.

To shift the cycle, try this:

• Build a conflict protocol with your team.
  Don’t wait until something goes sideways. Co-create a plan for what happens when conflict (inevitably) shows up.

• Normalize feedback everywhere.
  Add it to team meetings, project debriefs, and decision-making moments. When feedback is embedded into the rhythm of your work, it becomes culture, not a crisis.

• Invest in your people.
  Skill-building in emotional intelligence, mediation, or trauma-informed leadership is not a luxury, it’s a strategy.

Let’s Be Honest:

If you’re only hearing from the same few voices, that’s data. Which could mean that those folks are used to being heard. It could also mean others have learned it’s safer to stay silent. Neither is ideal, and both are fixable.

One thing for each of us to keep in mind is that some of what’s showing up at work isn’t about what’s on the surface. It’s not really about the plant-based creamer. Or the scheduling glitch. Or the tone of the last Slack message. It’s about what’s been brewing underneath: unspoken norms, invisible labor, and a lack of shared agreements.

Fearless leadership doesn’t mean solving every problem.
It means building systems that make fewer problems inevitable.

Ready to shift from reaction to intention?

Let’s build it together. Contact us at cjreed@fearless-spaces.com if you are interested in having us lead your team from crisis to strategic planning.