Failure is an inevitable part of leadership. In the social sector, where the work is deeply personal and mission-driven, failure can feel especially difficult. We often talk about it in terms of scaling impact, policy missteps, or funding challenges. But what about the failures we don’t discuss enough—the quieter, more subtle ones that have far-reaching implications for not only individuals but also organisations and teams.
This is an account of one such failure—of not being able to forge meaningful connections or truly understand the very people I worked alongside. It prompted reflection for not only me but also the leadership at Madhi Foundation. Ultimately, the experience led us to pivot and reimagine our approach to building a culture where every team member feels genuinely seen and valued.
Between August and September 2022, the team at Madhi Foundation grew from 25–30 people to more than 250. I was on a maternity break during this period. In January 2023, I returned to my role of co-founder, as part of which I was responsible for anchoring the people, culture, and operations vertical. Shortly after this, in April 2023, we conducted our annual engagement survey—an exercise to understand what drives the team morale.
Although this was not the first time we were running this survey, the 2023 employee engagement survey was particularly important as our team strength had grown almost 10 times. I was eager to understand the team morale and how people felt and thought about the organisation. At the same time, I was apprehensive about the potential results because I feared the worst. I had heard murmurs—concerns that the organisation wasn’t listening enough, that there weren’t enough spaces to share thoughts, and that people were feeling increasingly disconnected. In light of this, I wondered whether we should still go ahead with the survey. What would the team say? How would this reflect on the organisation, and on me, as a leader?
I went ahead with the survey because my intuition told me it was the right thing to do. And sure enough, the resulting numbers numbed me.
Only 50 percent of Madhi’s team members felt that decision-making was transparent or that they knew the rationale behind a decision. One team member wrote, “In cross-vertical collaborations, many of the decisions are taken in isolation without consulting all the teams involved. And even after the decisions are made, they are often not passed on to respective teams with the reason. This leads to information gaps.” Similarly, only 53 percent said that they receive timely coaching and feedback from their leaders.
These numbers quantified what my instincts had been telling me—team morale was low, and people were feeling disconnected from the organisation. The survey results were clear symptoms of an organisation growing in strength without focusing on what connects people to one another. To me, this seemed like a failure. As a leader, I believe that knowing each team member as an individual—and understanding what drives them—is critical to working as a cohesive team committed to solving pressing social problems. If I don’t know the people I work with, who am I designing policies for? I knew I wanted to put myself in my team members’ shoes to understand their challenges, aspirations, needs, and goals, but I didn’t know where to start.
Identifying what went wrong
1. Rapid scaling
In the development sector, discussions about scale often focus on geographies and numbers, but rarely on the people who drive the mission. At Madhi, our team grew exponentially within a month. During this transition, we spent a significant amount of time operationalising the scale—which was necessary—but we were not intentional about paying attention to the cultural dynamics of the organisation. At the core of scaling are not just the people we’re impacting, but the people we’re creating the impact with. We had not recognised this fundamental truth.
2. Discomfort with dissent
While my intuition told me that something was not right, I was extremely wary of hearing team members openly share what they thought was right or wrong. I was uncomfortable with facing dissent—and as a result, I was afraid of asking people for their honest feedback and avoided engaging in deep conversations with the team. For instance, in May 2023, we launched a revised performance appraisal framework that assigned weightage to observable behaviours aligned with Madhi’s core values—values every team member was committed to upholding in their work. But almost immediately, questions began pouring in: “How can we judge a person’s values based on their behaviours?”, “Isn’t this going to be skewed and biased given the subjectivity involved?”, “What best practices or research support this approach?”
With every message in the chat and every hand raised during virtual meetings, I felt increasingly overwhelmed. If everyone around me was so deeply sceptical of the process I was leading, what credibility did I really have as a leader?
3. Disconnect between organisational values and actions
To the team members, Madhi was beginning to come across as an organisation where there was dissonance between its stated values and day-to-day actions. This was affecting how people felt at work. For example, one of Madhi’s core values is empathy—not just in how we engage with schools and communities, but also in how we show up for one another as a team. But our internal communication did not always reflect that. Emails often felt formal and transactional. While we said we cared, we hadn’t created enough space to listen to and understand what people were going through. That gap between what we professed and how we behaved made team members feel unseen, even when our intentions were good.
How we started to right the wrongs
I realised that for us to be a team that promotes people and culture, it was essential to know and understand the people within it. To do this, Madhi took the following steps.
1. Fostering individual connections to build team culture
We brought back ‘coffee chats’—scheduled one-on-one conversations between team members aimed at cultivating deeper understanding. Some of the questions we asked included: What motivates you? What brings you joy? What frustrates you? While the practice existed on paper as part of our policies, in reality, it had long slipped off our list of priorities—something we now recognise as a serious oversight. To course-correct, we introduced structure and accountability into the process by making it a key performance indicator (KPI) for all senior leadership to conduct a set number of chats each quarter. These conversations were mandatory for leaders and open to everyone else. The hope was that team members would use them to connect with colleagues they were curious about, had misunderstandings with, or simply wanted to know better.
It was only after we started to understand the team that we could design inclusive, trust-based, and transparent policies and processes.
We also created a space called ‘unplugged’, where the leadership engaged with issues that resonated with the team. These conversations ranged from what social justice means to donning the CEO hat. These sessions allowed us to forge meaningful connections, which are fundamental to cultivating a cohesive space where people feel truly committed to the mission.
During a coffee chat, a team member told me that the most underrated trait in a leader is vulnerability. It was a key moment for me, because ever since taking on this role, I had been reeling under the weight of the credibility-versus-vulnerability dichotomy. How can the two co-exist? If I admit to not knowing something, how will I be respected and trusted? He asked, “But why do you think vulnerability doesn’t build credibility?” And he was right. The leadership team started sharing their failures openly and honestly and encouraged team members to also do the same. It was only after we started to understand the team, what they need, and what they were thinking that we could design inclusive, trust-based, and transparent policies and processes. If we had done this the other way around, we would have lacked clarity on who we are designing these policies for.
2. Define it, say it and show it
An organisation’s culture is an extension of individual culture. In one-on-one conversations, many team members shared how they love the people in the organisation and that this is one of the main reasons they came to work. This made me realise that we were doing something right. What remained was to translate the experience of feeling nurtured and cared for into observable behaviours, so the team could clearly understand the actions needed to build Madhi’s work culture. To support this, we designed a culture code within our policy, defining both exemplar and non-exemplar behaviours.
However, a culture code is meaningless unless it’s brought to life through action. I realised the importance of ‘walking the talk’. If we want to emphasise the benefits of working from the office for creative and collaborative work, the senior leadership must show up so that the team sees us. If we want the team to be empathetic and understanding of one another and the organisation, we need to show the team how it is done by engaging with diverse perspectives in bothteam spaces and one-on-one meetings.
3. Navigating difficult conversations with transparency
As an organisation, we have had to take several difficult decisions, such as having to let people go and instituting policies that might be construed as unfair and excessive. In a recent town hall—a meeting attended by the entire Madhi team—someone openly asked about the rationale behind a termination. The question came from a place of deep concern for the team member and trust that the organisation had a clear rationale. In that moment, I prioritised preserving the terminated team member’s dignity and dissuaded others from engaging in further conversation about the former team member in their absence. I remember this incident as being a revelatory moment for me as a leader because I was forced to think about what is right and just—for the team member who raised the question as well as the team member being discussed.
Unless we openly share opposing views and opinions, how can we grow and help the team do the same?
As leaders, it is critical to uphold individual dignity and respect for all as fundamental to running an organisation. Accepting hard truths with the team, debating them, and most importantly, being open to hearing dissent is central to building culture. Organisational leadership must engage in deep conversations about values and principles. And unless we openly share opposing views and opinions, how can we grow and help the team do the same?
In our most recent organisational survey, approximately 95 percent of the team felt that there is clear communication of the rationale behind decisions related to their work, a number that was 50 percent in 2023. We have a long way to go in sustaining this momentum. The more we invest in knowing and nurturing our teams, the stronger, more resilient, and more impactful we become. In the social sector—where our work is about building communities—the way we engage with our own teams determines the kind of change we can create in the world.
For anyone facing similar challenges, my advice is this: prioritise people. Build processes that foster connection. Create spaces for dialogue. And most importantly, don’t be afraid to listen.
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Know more
- Learn more about the traits needed to be a good leader.
- Read this to understand why nonprofits are hesitant to speak about failures.
- Learn why leaders focus more on organisational policies, and less on people.
