The false virtue of restraint: what would it take to actually win?

The Myth of Heroic Leadership interrogates the nonprofit sector’s reliance on “heroic” executive leadership as a structural failure disguised as virtue. It challenges the deeply embedded belief that resilience lives in individual grit, arguing instead that overreliance on executive directors concentrates power, masks institutional weakness, and reproduces inequity — particularly for women and leaders of color. Through a systems and justice lens, the column examines how boards, funders, and organizational norms reinforce this model, and why sustainability depends on redistributing authority, accountability, and care across institutions rather than extracting more from a single leader.

We have a particular way of praising nonprofits. We say they do so much with so little, and we mean it as a compliment. Yet the observation is closer to a diagnosis.

With this awareness, the question that we ask far less often is: why has the organization not grown to match the size that the work requires? And what strain does the organization bear as a result?

We ask nonprofit leaders to be wildly ambitious about the problems they want to solve, while remaining functionally modest about the institutions they want to build. Too often, this condition simply makes the mission harder to accomplish.

Want to end homelessness in your city? Be audacious.

Want to transform how children learn to read, how a neighborhood experiences art, or how a family survives an eviction notice? Dream bigger.

Yet, when an organization wants to build six months of reserves, establish a building of its own, or institute higher salaries to retain its best people, then suddenly the bold vision starts to sound irresponsible.

Housing, health, education, justice, the quality of our shared public life: these are among the largest challenges we face as a society. And yet we routinely ask the organizations confronting them to operate with thin reserves, undersized teams, restrained salaries, and infrastructure built for a much smaller job. That shift is so familiar that most of us barely notice it anymore. But we should — it’s a habit that creates a real cost to our organizations and the communities they serve.

If we are serious about solving large problems, then we have to be serious about what the work costs. That means paying people well enough to stay. It means having enough staff to do the work without relying on heroics. It means reserves, technology, management capacity, physical space, and the infrastructure required to build something durable.

To be clear, I am not arguing for growth for its own sake. Being “a bigger organization” is not the goal. But the goal should be for each organization to have enough resources, reach, power, and strength to match the size of the problem it exists to solve.

Going without those things is not a badge of honor. It does not make an organization more committed to its mission or increase organizational capacity to accomplish it.

How bold vision gets whittled down

The leaders I work with are not timid. Their vision is sized to what their communities need, and they come alive at the question of what their organizations could do if they were built for that work.

I worked with an executive director whose team developed a three-year plan to deepen its impact, expand across the region, and turn its curriculum into a model others could deliver. The plan also named what that growth would require: a stronger leadership team, competitive salaries, new partnerships, and significantly more revenue.

The board asked: Wouldn’t a larger leadership team make the organization top-heavy? Competitive salaries mattered, but where would the money come from? How realistic were the growth projections?

Every question was reasonable. And by the time the process was over, the plan had been reduced to a fraction of its original ambition. This is how it usually happens. Rarely does someone simply say, “Your vision is too big,” or “You’re being too ambitious.”

Instead, projections get revised downward.

A key hire gets pushed to a later phase. The revenue goal gets based on what funders have given before rather than what the work will require. A grant request gets sized to what feels fundable. No single decision kills the vision, but together they reshape the vision to fit the funding environment rather than to respond to the problem.

How nonprofit became an expectation of smallness

Part of this problem sits inside the misconception of the word nonprofit itself. Legally, nonprofit does not mean an organization should operate with little. It means that the organization cannot distribute its surplus to private owners. Legal scholar Henry Hansmann called this the “nondistribution constraint:” money generated by the organization stays with the organization and its mission.

That is a rule about where money goes. Somewhere along the way, we turned it into an unwritten rule about how much money an organization should have. A competitive salary for a leader looks like self-interest, as though people who work in this sector should not care about money. Good benefits for staff seem harder to justify compared to a new program site. Resources for a new hire are framed as resources taken from the community. An organizational surplus is seen as a betrayal rather than a sound financial decision.

However, an organization can pay competitive salaries, build significant reserves, hire the people the work requires, and generate a surplus while fully honoring its obligation to keep those resources devoted to its mission. These are not departures from the mission. In fact, for many organizations, they are what the mission requires.

We have taken a rule designed to prevent private benefit and layered onto it a cultural expectation of institutional restraint. And because that expectation is rarely stated outright, it often shows up disguised as responsibility: keep the team lean, keep salaries reasonable, keep overhead low, don’t get ahead of the funding.

We turned a rule about distribution into a rule about bold vision. And then we started calling that prudence.

We confuse deprivation with stewardship

We have come to associate restraint with responsible stewardship. But prudence means matching resources to risk. And one of the greatest risks that a mission-driven organization faces is failing to accomplish the very thing it exists to do.

A board that approves a plan too small for the problem has not avoided risk. Instead, it has traded the risk of overreaching for the near certainty of underreaching. The plan looks safe because its failure will be quiet.

“Doing more with less” is not a strategy for changing large problems. It is just doing less than the problem requires.

Smallness does not guarantee accountability either. Organizations without reserves, revenue diversity, or room to maneuver, can become deeply dependent on the funders they cannot afford to lose. That dependence can shape what gets prioritized, what gets postponed, and eventually what the organization believes is possible.

Scrappy organizations are extraordinary at keeping going. But keeping going without the capacity to change the problem means, year after year, communities are served by organizations that can survive the problem but cannot fundamentally change it.

That cost does not appear on a balance sheet. There is no line item for the eviction policy that never changed, or the reading gap that stayed open.

Size the work to the problem

The practical shift is simple: Build the institution that the work actually requires.

Leaders can begin by being explicit about the true cost of the impact they intend to have: the budget, the staff, the infrastructure, and the reach it would actually take to change the problem, even before anyone knows how to fund it. A plan that names the real size of the work is not naive. It gives the board and funders an actual understanding of what is needed.

While the question “What can we afford?” is a necessary one, it should not be the first question asked by boards. The first question should be: “What would it take to accomplish our mission?” The answer is information, not a fantasy to be managed.

Funders can also stop treating scrappiness as an organizational virtue. They should fund reserves, multi-year growth, strong teams, and the institutional capacity that allows an organization to say no, stay in the fight, and keep its seat at the table.

For decades, the sector has asked how much good it can do with what it has. We should be asking a different question: what would it take to actually win?