The Staff’s Role in Nonprofit Strategic Planning

What role should staff play in strategic planning?

It’s a question we get asked often, and the answer is not as straightforward as you may think.

Last month we made the case that a board’s job in strategic planning is to govern, not direct. On the flip side, the staff’s role is to develop the details of the plan, and to own its implementation.

In this article and in the podcast episode that goes with it, we work through where and how staff should be involved in planning, what happens when they are handed a plan to implement that they did not play a role in creating,  how to involve leadership and frontline staff appropriately, and the point at which staff expertise stops being the right input. Read on, or listen to the full conversation above.

What the Staff’s Role Actually Is

Staff take the broad strategic direction of the organization (direction that should have been shaped with their input alongside the board and other stakeholders) and determine how the rubber meets the road.  They decide how the work actually gets done, how goals are measured, and how the plan gets implemented and sustained.

That role exists because of what staff know. They know the programs. They know the partnerships. They know the organization’s real capacity, as opposed to its aspirational capacity. And in most nonprofits, staff are the closest people in the organization to the communities the nonprofit serves.

This means nothing should enter the plan without staff knowledge and genuine understanding. This should be more than just a courtesy or a buy-in exercise after the fact; staff should be central to the planning process.

Why Board-Built Plans Fail at Implementation

We still see plans developed by a board, a consultant, or some combination of the two, then handed to staff to execute. Usually this happens for an understandable reason: the board has been told it owns the strategic plan, so it books a retreat, develops the pillars and priorities, and passes the result to the team.

The strategy itself might be sound, but it still tends to fail, for four distinct reasons:

The plan turns out to be unrealistic

We worked with an organization whose board was energized about launching a social enterprise. Longtime staff had to explain that the organization had already done significant work on exactly that question years earlier — a real evaluation of the value proposition and the organization’s ability to execute — and concluded after due diligence that there was no effective path forward. That history lived with staff. It was not in the room when the plan was built. This is just one example of the unnecessary or unrealistic paths a plan can go down when staff is not in the room.

The reasoning behind the plan is invisible

When staff are not part of development, they do not know why the board set the direction it set. Without that reasoning, a plan can read as evidence that board members are out of touch with what the organization actually needs, even when the direction is defensible.

There is no real ownership

People get invested in work they had a hand in shaping. That is not a soft observation about morale; it is the mechanism by which accountability happens. Hand someone a plan they had no part in creating and it is genuinely difficult for them to feel responsible for its success.

The math does not work

Budget, timing and bandwidth are staff knowledge. A plan built without them tends not to account for what else the team is already carrying, which is how ambitious plans quickly become shelf documents.

A plan can be board-approved and genuinely exciting to the board and still fail, because it never became a staff-owned operating roadmap. That is not a partial success. It is the opposite of what board oversight of a strategic plan is for.

The Opposite Failure: Staff Planning Alone

The reverse happens too, and it is worth naming because organizations that have been burned by a board-built plan often overcorrect straight into their next planning process.

This usually shows up when a board is disengaged and does not see strategic planning as its concern, or when staff have decided the board is too removed from daily operations to contribute anything useful. The result is a process with no outside perspective in it.

Boards bring something staff structurally cannot: distance. Board members can often provide a more objective read on the organization, as well as a view shaped by fiduciary responsibility and long-term stewardship. Staff, understandably, are often protective of existing programs and initiatives. The work they have built and believe in is hard to give up, even if a new strategic direction might indicate changing course. That protectiveness can crowd out exactly the change that would create more impact.

The goal is not staff dominance replacing board dominance. It is both groups contributing where their expertise is real, and being willing to be shaped by the other.

What Staff Should be Involved?

This is where the principle gets particularly difficult in practice. Every staff member needs a role in strategic planning, but n ot everyone should be involved in the same way. We suggest sorting staff into two groups:

Group 1: The staff planning committee

We recommend a standing staff strategic planning committee that meets weekly or biweekly and does the bulk of the work. Keep it cross-functional and keep it between roughly five and ten people. Larger than that and it stops being able to work; smaller and it stops being representative.

A committee that functions well usually includes:

• The CEO or executive director. Not optional, and worth saying explicitly, because we have seen processes run without them.
• Senior leaders responsible for major areas of the work.
• Program or frontline perspective. The people closest to delivery and closest to the communities you serve.
• Operations or finance expertise. The people who know what is actually affordable and feasible.
• Trusted communicators. People with enough standing among colleagues to carry information in both directions credibly.

Everyone who is not on the committee

The rest of the staff are involved at different levels and at different moments:

• Early input through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, before direction has formed.
• Research share-outs so people see what was learned and how their input was used. This is the step most often skipped, and skipping it is why staff surveys so frequently breed cynicism rather than trust.
• Town halls or listening sessions once draft pillars exist and before the paint is dry, while feedback can still change something.
• Implementation planning for anyone integral to carrying the work forward: the objectives, key results, and activity plans that ladder up to each pillar.

Handled this way, there is no single dramatic rollout at the end. There is a cadence of touchpoints, and nobody who touches the plan is blindsided by it.

The Limits to Staff Expertise

Staff are frequently the closest connection an organization has to the people it serves. That closeness is real, and it is why staff are sometimes treated as a workable proxy for community voice, particularly with beneficiaries that are genuinely hard to reach, or when the people served are youth.

However, staff expertise shouldn’t be considered a direct stand-in for community voice.

Different groups hold different kinds of essential knowledge. Staff understand operations, programs, systems, constraints, and how implementation actually works. The people and communities you serve understand their own lives, their own needs, and their own experience of your organization in a way that even the most attentive staff member cannot fully articulate on their behalf. Board members understand governance and long-term stewardship. Funders and partners see the wider ecosystem and where resources move.

Shared Power™ strategic planning is not about flattening those roles or filing each group into a silo. It is about refusing to treat institutional position as proof that one voice matters more than another.

In practice, that means staff use their expertise to determine how the organization can respond to stakeholder priorities effectively and sustainably, not to decide what those priorities are without the relevant people in the room.

The Pushback You’ll Hear (and How to Answer It)

The most common objection we hear to involving staff deeply is some version of: our board will not speak candidly with staff in the room. It comes up most often about retreats.

Take that seriously, but not as a strategic planning problem. If a board cannot have open conversations in front of the organization’s leadership team, that is information about the board/staff culture, and it points to work that needs to happen before a planning process begins rather than a reason to run the process differently.

A strategic plan is not a substitute for a conversation that belongs in a closed-door board meeting. If the concern feels familiar, the useful question is what is actually behind it.

What to Do Next

Want to involve staff well in your next strategic planning process? Here’s what to do next:

• Name the roles before the work begins. Put in writing what belongs to the board, what belongs to the staff planning committee, where the full staff plugs in, where community stakeholders have input, and how the facilitator fits. Then make sure both the board and staff have actually read it.
• Build the right committee. Small enough to function, broad enough to hold cross-functional, frontline, and implementation knowledge.
• Create two-way engagement throughout. Gather staff input early, keep the committee in the core work, test emerging strategy with the broader team, and every time, explain how the feedback affected the decision. The explanation is what makes it two-way.

Quick Summary

Frequently Asked Questions

Who should be on a nonprofit strategic planning committee?

A cross-functional group of roughly five to ten people: the CEO or executive director, senior leaders over major areas of work, program or frontline staff, someone with operations or finance expertise, and people trusted enough by colleagues to communicate credibly in both directions. Small enough to make decisions, broad enough to represent how the organization actually works.

Can a nonprofit board write the strategic plan without staff?

It can, and the result is usually a plan that struggles at implementation. Boards typically lack visibility into capacity, dependencies, operational risk, and what the organization has already tried. Staff who receive a plan they did not shape also have little genuine ownership of it, which undermines accountability regardless of how strong the strategy is.

What if our board will not speak openly with staff in the room?

That signals a board dynamic worth addressing on its own terms, before a planning process starts. A strategic plan should not become the workaround for a conversation that belongs in a board meeting.

Is involving staff enough to represent the communities we serve?

No. Staff are often the closest connection an organization has to its community, and their perspective is essential, but people understand their own needs and experiences in ways others cannot articulate for them. Shared Power™ strategic planning treats community voice as its own required input rather than something staff can stand in for.

From the Podcast

This article is based on Episode 18 of Changemaker Conversations, the podcast for nonprofit leaders by Prosper Strategies. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or at ChangemakerConversations.com.

Related episodes in this series:

• Episode 17: The Board’s Role in Nonprofit Strategic Planning
• Episode 15: What Does a Facilitator Actually Do in Nonprofit Strategic Planning?
• Episode 8: The Four Roles That Make—or Break—Your Strategic Planning Process

If this has you thinking about whether you have the right people in the right roles, take a look at our nonprofit strategic planning approaches — from the self-guided Nonprofit Strategic Planning Toolbox to workshops, facilitation, and full-service planning.

About the Host

Alyssa Conrardy is co-founder and principal at Prosper Strategies, where she has led strategic planning, brand, and growth engagements for nonprofits across the country for more than a decade. She is the co-creator of the Shared Power™ Strategy methodology and the Nonprofit Strategic Planning Toolbox.