Life & Leadership with Kim Williams

Have you ever been moving along, confident in your organization’s direction, and then discovered an issue you didn’t know was there?

I did. After an unexpected two week hiatus, I’m back with Episode 110 of Life & Leadership with Kim Williams: The Emergency Reset: What to Do When a Hidden Problem Comes to Light.

I share why I give myself 24 hours before addressing an issue that has deeply frustrated or disappointed me. That pause gives me time to work through my own feelings of guilt and shame, consider how I want to show up, and make sure my correction of others is seasoned with grace.

I also share my five step reset strategy for leaders who need to pause, listen, recenter on the mission, make a plan, and follow through.

Here is what I know for sure. You can’t keep operating like it’s business as usual and survive the season or make it to your next level. Something has to change. But here’s where most leaders get it wrong and where I got it wrong in the past. We skip straight from deciding to change to announcing the change. I’ve learned that the success of the transition is usually based on what you do in the preparation period between the decision and the announcement. Today, I’m going to share 5 Quiet Steps You Need to Make Before Announcing Your Next Big Move.

Season 4 opens with the uncomfortable middle of every call to go higher, the space between the whispered word from God and the public step of obedience. Kim walks through what she calls the tension of the transition, the season when comfort turns to discomfort, significance turns to insignificance, and God starts rattling the nest. Drawing from her own history of major leaps, leaving Girl Scouts for the CEO role at Interfaith Family Services, launching a capital campaign, and now leading a capacity building initiative, she names the three reasons leaders resist the next level and makes the case for leaning into the change anyway.

What do you do when you realize you made the wrong decision as a leader? You own it, learn from it, make the adjustment, and keep leading.

In Episode 107, Kim shares a recent decision she had to reconsider and why admitting you made a bad call can actually strengthen your credibility as a leader. After 30 years in her career and 15 years as a CEO, she has learned that it is much easier to humbly admit fault than to firmly stand by a failure.

In this episode, Kim shares:

• Why pride can make it difficult for leaders to admit they were wrong
• How changing course can strengthen rather than diminish your credibility
• Why criticism should not keep you from making the right adjustment
• The importance of recognizing when God may be leading you to slow down or change direction
• Why good leaders own it, learn from it, and keep leading

Episode 107 also marks the close of Season Two as Kim shares why she is taking the remainder of September off and what listeners can expect when Season Three of Life & Leadership with Kim Williams launches October 6.

Over the last three episodes, we have covered a lot of ground. How to build one connected fall campaign instead of six competing ones, how to protect your team from becoming part of the burnout statistics climbing across our sector, and why that protection has to extend past your fundraising staff to your entire organization. If you have been listening along, you have probably ended up with a question or two of your own. Today, I'm answering the three I hear most often since we started this run of episodes.

As you head into your busiest fundraising season of the year, you are facing a second challenge most campaign calendars do not account for. Keeping your people, not just the ones raising the money, but every role that keeps your mission running. According to the Center for Effective Philanthropy's State of Nonprofits 2026 report, one in four nonprofit CEOs now say burnout is significantly affecting their staff, up from seventeen percent the year before, and thirty percent of nonprofits have already reduced staff since last year. At the same time, the 2026 Social Impact Staff Retention Report found that seventy two percent of nonprofit professionals are actively looking for new opportunities, and only thirty five percent say they definitely plan to stay in the nonprofit sector at all. If you are heading into Giving Day, your annual campaign, and year end fundraising without a plan to protect your whole team, today's episode is your narrow window to build one.

Nearly seven in ten nonprofit employees say they plan to look for a new job this year, according to the Social Impact Staff Retention Project's most recent survey, and turnover across our sector already sits at nineteen percent, compared to twelve percent almost everywhere else. Here's what most leaders miss. That search does not usually start in the spring. It starts after the hardest quarter of the year has already worn your team down. If you are heading into fall wondering how to keep your best people through your busiest season, today I want to walk you through the strategies that have kept my team steady, quarter after quarter, for fifteen years.

The Blackbaud Institute found that more than one-third of all charitable giving happens in the final three months of the year, and December alone accounts for nearly one-fifth of annual giving. That's an incredible opportunity, but it's also an incredibly demanding season for development professionals. Fundraise describes today's fundraising environment as one of sustained pressure, where small teams are being asked to do more with fewer resources. That's why preparing now isn't just about raising more money. It's about protecting your team while positioning your organization for a successful year-end campaign. Today, we discuss four ways to do that.

Episode 102 — Your Mid-Year Reset Questions, Answered

Mid-Year Reset Series finale. Thirty-nine percent of nonprofits ended last fiscal year with a deficit, up from twenty-two percent just three years earlier, and nearly half of nonprofit leaders now worry about possible closure. Closing out the Mid-Year Reset series, Kim answers the three questions leaders ask her most: how to approach donors about a crisis without losing their confidence, how to know when to draw on resources versus cut expenses, and how to decide who stays when downsizing becomes necessary. She also shares the story behind why she opened her consulting firm in the first place.

Episode 101 — Leading Change Without Losing Your Team

One in four nonprofit CEOs now say burnout is significantly impacting their staff, up from just seventeen percent the year before, and thirty percent of nonprofits have reduced staff in the past year alone. Kim shares the one time a deficit forced her into downsizing, and the fear that came with it: would the team that stayed feel like they were next? She breaks down three strategies that turned a painful season into one that brought her team closer together instead of splintering it, and improved both retention and outcomes.

Episode 100 — How to Face the Inevitable Budget Deficit

A third of nonprofits saw federal funding decline last year, and nearly three in ten saw cuts in state and local support. If your organization is behind goal, you are not the exception. In this milestone hundredth episode, Kim shares three deficits from her own fifteen years leading a nonprofit, one inherited, one funder-driven, one government-driven, and the three-step framework she uses to size up a shortfall before ever touching a strategy. She walks through the exact playbook that carried her through every one of them, and what it took to go from a $500,000 gap to closing an $11.5 million capital campaign.

Episode 99: The Mid-Year Reset Every Nonprofit Leader Needs to Make

Mid-Year Reset Series, Part 1 — Leadership Mentality

Halfway through the year, your January plan meets July's reality, and it rarely matches. Kim opens the Mid-Year Reset series with the mindset shift that has to happen before any strategy work can: the willingness to face where things actually stand. Drawing on fifteen years as CEO of Interfaith Family Services, she shares three strategies for leading through a mid-year reality check: reality-check and acceptance, the mentality shift, and speaking points and self-care.

The number of donors giving less than $500 annually dropped by 5 percent in 2024. Large in-person galas and traditional direct mail are declining in effectiveness. But volunteerism is up 7 percent. Monthly giving programs are growing. Corporate social responsibility budgets are increasingly shifting toward employee engagement experiences, not just corporate check-writing. What donors and corporate partners want right now is not just a receipt and a thank-you letter. They want a meaningful connection to the work. Organizations that design giving programs around that desire are seeing dramatically better retention and dramatically stronger relationships.

Today, we explore the power of engaged giving.

For four consecutive years, the number of individual donors to American nonprofits has declined. The steepest drop is at the bottom of the pyramid, donors giving under $500. At the same time, major donor and corporate giving has grown, which means total revenue numbers can look stable even as the base of community support is quietly eroding. That erosion matters more than the dollar amount. A broad, active community of small donors is one of the most important signals of organizational credibility you can send to foundation funders, government partners, and major donors. It says: this organization matters to people, not just to institutions.

Today, we talk about how to stop the decline and invest in the future.

What if I told you that the most powerful fundraising ask you could make right now has nothing to do with serving more people? What if the ask that would inspire your most loyal, long-term donors is not about expanding your programs at all? Today, I want to challenge one of the most deeply held assumptions in the social sector: that growth is always the story donors want to hear.

The era of reliable federal and state funding for social service organizations is ending. Not pausing. Ending. The Nonprofit Finance Fund's 2025 survey found that 36 percent of nonprofits ended 2024 with an operating deficit, the highest figure in a decade. More than half have three months or less of cash on hand. At the same time, the number of individual donors has declined for four consecutive years. We are in a sector where costs are rising, demand is up, federal appropriations are shrinking, and the donor base is getting smaller. That is not a temporary storm. It is a structural shift. Today, we are going to talk about how to address it and avoid it. Kim offers three strategies for going from vulnerability to sustainability.

One of the hardest realities many new leaders face is this: inheriting a leadership title does not automatically mean you inherited the right leadership team. The question becomes, how do you know who needs development, who needs clarity, and who may no longer fit the future of the organization?

Today, we’re talking about one of the most emotionally difficult parts of leadership transition: Evaluating the leadership team you inherit.

Because one of the greatest mistakes new leaders make is assuming they must either keep everyone or replace everyone quickly. Wise leadership requires discernment, patience, and honest evaluation.

Have you ever walked into a leadership role thinking people wanted transformation… only to discover they were far more comfortable with familiarity? One of the biggest surprises new leaders face is this: people often celebrate the idea of change until change actually begins.

That’s because transition disrupts comfort, familiarity, relationships, routines, and sometimes identity. I had to learn that leadership during transition required more than strategy. It required emotional intelligence, consistency, patience, and trust-building. Because transition reveals what stability was hiding.

In today's episode, we talk about it.

What happens when more than half of nonprofit CEOs leave their roles within the next five years… but most organizations still aren’t prepared for succession? The nonprofit sector may be heading toward one of the greatest leadership gaps we’ve ever seen. The question is not whether the transition is coming. The question is whether your organization will survive it wisely.

Today, we talk about it. Because the organizations that survive the next decade well will not necessarily be the organizations with the largest budgets.

They will be the organizations that prepare wisely for leadership continuity.

Have you ever stepped into a leadership role thinking your biggest challenge would be strategy, only to discover the hardest part was managing people, pressure, perception, and your own emotions all at the same time?

Research shows that nonprofit leadership transitions are among the most vulnerable periods in an organization’s life. Donor confidence can decline. Staff anxiety increases. Expectations rise immediately. Yet most new nonprofit leaders are handed the keys to complex organizations with very little preparation for what the role actually feels like behind closed doors.

If you’re a new executive director, first-time CEO, or emerging nonprofit leader trying to navigate change while carrying the weight of a mission, today’s conversation is for you.