How Melanie Palmer's Work with Nonprofit Boards Taught Me Something New About Owner Dependency

I'll be honest — when I scheduled Melanie Palmer for the podcast, I thought we'd have a conversation about nonprofits that would be mildly interesting to my usual audience of business owners. Good content, different sector, probably a few crossover points.

I was wrong. By about the twenty-minute mark, I was leaning into the microphone.

Melanie runs Melanie Palmer Consulting out of Fayetteville, and her work centers on helping nonprofits do more — more money through grants and fundraising, more direction through strategic planning, more capacity through leadership development. She comes to this work from a deeply personal place: her background is in victim services, and she's spent her career supporting organizations that fight gender-based violence. That mission-driven fire shows up in how she thinks about leadership.

But here's what caught me off guard: everything she described about broken nonprofit boards, I've watched play out in for-profit companies all week long.

When trust goes quiet, everything starts to drift

Melanie works with about thirty nonprofits a year, and she hears the same thing from executive directors over and over: something's not right, we're just not in sync anymore. When she digs in, she almost always finds the same root cause — relationships that never got built.

Nonprofit boards are volunteer-run. These are busy, accomplished people squeezing governance work into lives that are already full. And if the executive director isn't intentionally building one-on-one relationships with each board member, those connections never form. Without relationship, you can't have trust. Without trust, you can't have honest conversations about where the organization is drifting or why it's stuck.

That's not a nonprofit problem. That's a leadership problem — and it shows up everywhere.

How many business owners do I talk to who say, "I don't really know what's going on with my team"? They're in every meeting. They answer every question. But they've never built the actual relationships that would let someone tell them the truth. Trust doesn't happen because you're in the same room. It happens because you've made it safe to be honest.

The dependency trap has a nonprofit twin

Melanie described an executive director — someone who was gifted, mission-driven, deeply competent — around whom everything orbited. Every decision, every relationship, every institutional memory lived in that one person. Sound familiar?

In my world, I call that owner dependency. Melanie called it something similar: the moment that person steps away, it's only a matter of time before things start to fall apart.

She made a point I thought was worth sitting with: the board and the executive director often exist in a loop of mutual abdication. The executive director thinks the board is in charge of strategy, fundraising direction, and big decisions. The board thinks they hired the executive director to handle all of that. And in the middle, there's a gap — and nobody's driving the bus.

I've seen that same hole in for-profit businesses. The owner assumes the leadership team will take initiative. The leadership team assumes the owner wants final say on everything. And nothing moves.

A good consultant, Melanie said, can come in and drive the bus for a while — not permanently, but long enough to get things pointed in a shared direction. Because, as she put it: "It's hard to read the label from inside the bottle."

I'm going to be using that one.

What assessments actually do

This is where Melanie and I really started riffing. She's a certified CliftonStrengths coach, and she shared a story from her early career that I think explains why assessments matter better than any framework ever could.

When she was in college at the U of A, her entire residence hall went through StrengthsQuest. She got her results — strategic thinking and relator, the ability to work deeply with individuals toward a goal. She was on a team of nine people that year, and they couldn't function as a group. Not because of any bad intentions. Just nine individually great ingredients that didn't belong in the same dish.

So Melanie leaned into her strengths. She stopped trying to work as a group and started following up with each teammate individually after staff meetings. She built trust one person at a time. It worked.

Then came her performance review. Her boss — a high-communication, team-meeting kind of leader — gave her low marks for being a team player. He had no idea she'd been doing the work. It was invisible to him because it didn't look like how he would have done it.

She asked him to check with her teammates before it went in her file. He came back sheepish. Every one of them called her their most supportive colleague.

The lesson isn't just about assessments. It's about this: there are many roads to the same destination. When you don't have a shared language for how people operate, you'll misread good work as bad work. You'll misread quiet collaboration as disengagement. You'll reward the people who look like you and miss the ones who are actually delivering.

That's why I use DISC with my clients, and why Melanie coaches CliftonStrengths. Not because a 34-item profile is magic — but because it gives teams a vocabulary. It's a shortcut to understanding. And when you're an executive director trying to build trust with sixteen volunteers who each have a full life outside your organization, or a business owner trying to delegate to a team you've never quite let run, that shortcut is worth something real.

The strategic plan nobody built

One more thing Melanie said that I want to call out, because I think it's underestimated in every organization, not just nonprofits.

She talked about how many boards have a strategic plan that's either too vague to implement or so detailed that nobody reads it. Eighty-six pages on a shelf. When she comes in and helps a board create a clear, simple plan — here's where we're going over the next few years, here's your role in it — she watches problems that looked like something else entirely dissolve. Fundraising issues. Engagement issues. Conflict issues.

A lot of them were just direction issues.

I see that constantly with business owners. Teams that can't execute aren't always unmotivated or under-skilled. Sometimes they just don't know where you're going. And if they don't know where you're going, they can't lead anyone else there either.

Clarity isn't a soft leadership skill. It's the infrastructure that everything else runs on.

Melanie and I could have talked for another hour, and I suspect we will. If you work with a nonprofit — as an executive director, a board member, or a consultant — this episode is worth your time. And if you lead a for-profit and find yourself wondering why your team never quite runs the way you imagined, I'd bet you'll hear yourself somewhere in this conversation too.

You can find Melanie at melaniepalmerconsulting.com and schedule a free consultation directly through her site.

And if any of this landed for you — if you're recognizing the dependency trap or realizing your team doesn't really know where you're going — I'd love to have a conversation. You can set up time with me at app.reclaim.ai/m/alan-trustbuiltsolutions/quick-meeting.

Watch or listen to this episode here: youtu.be/KoUbnp4IeWc