Early in my career at a large corporate law firm, I watched a pattern repeat itself with remarkable consistency. A big deal would heat up, the pressure would mount, and the answer was always the same: throw more people at it. Partners would redeploy attorneys, paralegals, and staff midstream, pulling them from other work and dropping them into deals for which they had no context. Some were in over their heads. Others were already drowning somewhere else. The ones who survived it had to be part mind-reader, part endurance athlete, part legal savant.
It worked, kind of. It worked because big law had the resources to do it. Capital was redeployable on a moment’s notice. But it was brutal, inefficient, and taught me something important about what happens when organizations substitute money and bodies for systems and structure.
What I didn’t yet understand was how deeply that pattern was baked into the culture, not just in law firms, but in how we’ve been socialized to operate within capitalist structures. The implicit employer-side social contract has long assumed that we don’t need great systems; we just need enough resources to throw at the problem. Hierarchy, siloed departments, compensation structures that reward individual credit over collaboration, all of it conspires against the kind of cross-functional cohesion that actually solves hard problems. People don’t hoard resources because there isn’t enough of them. They hoard because they want consistency and stability, and what exists isn’t structured to be shared effectively.
When I left law and eventually founded Leverage to Lead, I carried that observation with me into a very different kind of work.
What We Keep Finding
When leaders bring us in, they often frame the problem as a people problem. Morale is low. A team is in conflict. A key employee is struggling. What we find, time and again, is something different: they don’t have extraordinary people problems, they have structure and systems problems. And unlike big law, most of the organizations we work with can’t throw people and money at it. They’re lean. They’re mission-driven. Their margin for waste is thin.
What they need is the capacity to coalesce. Not as a permanent reorganization, but as a practiced skill. The ability to form temporary alliances across departments, disciplines, and roles to move toward a shared goal, then reconfigure when the challenge changes.
That kind of flexibility doesn’t happen by accident. It requires intentional structure, working agreements, and a culture where collaboration is valued rather than penalized. It takes years to build in real time. And many of the clients who have built it are finding they need to call on it more urgently than ever before.
The Moment We’re In
The organizations we work with today, nonprofits and companies alike, are navigating a convergence of pressures that would have been difficult to imagine even a decade ago. These aren’t temporary disruptions. They are structural shifts that are redefining what it means to lead.
- The social safety net is eroding. Healthcare access, housing stability, and food security are no longer just social policy issues. They are workforce issues. Leaders are increasingly managing teams where employees are carrying significant personal burdens that affect their capacity, focus, and well-being. The boundary between an employee’s life outside of work and their ability to show up inside of it has never been thinner.
- Federal funding is volatile and, for many nonprofits, actively under threat. Organizations built on the assumption of stable public funding are being forced to reimagine their revenue models in real time, often while simultaneously serving communities whose needs are growing. And it isn’t only government funding that is shifting. Philanthropy itself is in flux. Individual donors and foundations are rethinking how and where they give, and those decisions are increasingly shaped by political identity and affiliation. Organizations that once had reliable philanthropic relationships are finding that the ground beneath those relationships has shifted in ways unrelated to the quality of their work.
- AI and automation are reshaping roles faster than most organizations can respond. The question is no longer whether these tools will change how work gets done. It’s whether your organization has the internal agility to adapt without losing the people and relationships that make you effective.
- Economic volatility is the new normal. Revenue and interest rate instability, shifting donor behavior, and changing consumer patterns mean that organizations can no longer plan in straight lines. The ability to pivot, triage, and redeploy is now a core leadership competency.
Taken together, these pressures don’t just require good management. They require creativity. They require leaders who can look at a resource-constrained, rapidly shifting environment and ask not, “Who can I throw at this?” but “How do we move together?”
Coalescence as Strategy
Many of the organizations we work with didn’t arrive at this moment without preparation. They did the work. They operationalized their values. They built working agreements and systems. And still, things are buckling, not because the values were wrong, but because the context has shifted underneath them.
Here’s something we’ve come to understand deeply: values are not inherently stabilizing. They are neutral. They can work for an organization or against it, depending on how they are being interpreted and lived in a given moment.
Take agency, a value many organizations embrace and for good reason. Agency, as the ability to make sound decisions, hold responsibility, work independently, and be a team player, is enormously generative. But in a climate of external instability and overwhelm, that same value can shift in meaning. An employee who once embodied agency as shared leadership may begin to experience it as “leave me alone to do my own work”. The value hasn’t changed, but the conditions have. And if leadership isn’t paying attention, the drift is nearly invisible until it becomes a fracture.
The same is true of mission and vision. In a period of existential pressure, revenue stability and client or constituent growth can begin to displace mission as the organizing force; not through any conscious decision, but through the accumulating weight of urgency. This is not always wrong. Sometimes survival has to come first. But it requires honest, explicit leadership to name that shift and hold the tension between what you’re here to do and what you need to do right now to stay here.
And then there is the human reality of asking people to adapt inside all of this. Internal coalition building often means asking people to expand their roles, develop new skills, and show up differently, at the exact moment they are feeling least equipped to do so. This is where brain science matters. When people are overwhelmed by circumstances outside their control, the default neurological response is passivity, a kind of helplessness that is not a character flaw but a hardwired protection.
Agency, by contrast, is learned. It is built through the repeated experience of having control over something that matters. Leaders who understand this don’t just ask their teams to step up. They create the conditions, small, real, meaningful, in which people can experience their own efficacy again.
That is the foundation on which coalitions are actually built.
What Leaders Must Steward
The organizations that will navigate this moment well are those whose leaders are willing to bear the full weight of what’s being asked of them.
That is not a small thing to name.
Stewarding an organization through an existential challenge is genuinely hard. It requires you to be honest with your team about what you’re facing, not to alarm them, but because shared understanding is the foundation of shared action. It requires you to build coalitions not just in moments of crisis but as an ongoing practice, so that when the moment comes, the capacity is already there.
It also requires clarity about what is non-negotiable. Not every part of your mission, your model, or your structure is sacred. Some of it can flex. Some of it must. But underneath the flexibility, there has to be a clear answer to the question:
What are we here to do, and what does success actually look like right now, not in five years, but now?
Shared purpose is not the same as shared vision. Vision is directional. Purpose is relational. It is what connects people to themselves, to each other, and to the work when the path is uncertain. The leaders we most admire in this work are the ones who hold that distinction; who can articulate a north star while remaining genuinely adaptive about how the organization gets there.
Coalition as Partnership
This is the work we find ourselves in alongside the organizations we support, not as outside experts handing down frameworks, but as partners sitting inside the complexity with them. There is no tidy answer to what measures success when the ground keeps shifting. What we know is that the leaders navigating this moment most honestly are the ones who are willing to hold the questions openly with their teams:
- What are we actually here to do?
- What can flex and what cannot?
- Who do we need to be to each other right now?
Those aren’t questions you answer once. They are questions you return to, together, as the conditions change. That returning, that practice of coming back to each other around what matters, is what internal coalition building actually looks like from the inside.
And it requires more than goodwill to sustain it. In our experience, the coalitions that hold are built on a particular kind of discipline, one we think of as roughly 50% critical thinking, 30% relational intelligence, and 20% action.
The critical thinking is the largest share for a reason. It is the rigorous, honest examination of what is actually true about your organization, your environment, and your constraints. Without it, you are reacting, not leading. The relational intelligence is what keeps the thinking grounded in the human reality of your team: how people are experiencing the moment, what they need to feel capable, and whether trust is being built or eroded. The action, when it finally comes, is deliberate and well-timed. Not the frantic doing that substitutes for thinking, but movement that emerges from clarity.
Most organizations under pressure invert this entirely. They collapse into action, lose their thinking, and let their relating atrophy.
Coalition building is the practice of resisting that collapse, together, again and again, for as long as the work demands it.