When Your Team Feels Off: 5 Ways Nonprofit Leaders Can Spot Misalignment Before It Becomes Burnout

Insights from Andrés Márquez-Lara

Most nonprofit leaders know the feeling.

Nothing is necessarily broken, but something feels off.

Meetings feel heavier than they used to. Conversations become shorter. Decisions take longer. Team members seem less engaged or less willing to speak honestly. You can’t always point to a specific problem, but you can feel that something has shifted.

In a sector where people are constantly balancing community needs, funding pressures, reporting requirements, and limited capacity, it can be tempting to push through these moments and hope they resolve themselves.

But according to community organizer, improv actor, therapist, and organizational development expert Andrés Márquez-Lara, that feeling is often an early warning sign that something deeper needs attention.

During a recent Nonprofit Hive AMA, Andrés shared a practical framework for understanding team misalignment and offered a reminder that many organizational challenges are less about personalities and more about clarity, trust, and communication.

Key Takeaways

• When something feels off on a team, treat that feeling as information rather than something to ignore. Data that informs a hypothesis that you test and validate.
• Most team tension is not caused by personalities alone. Goals, roles, and processes often play a bigger role than we realize.
• Healthy conflict is only possible when trust already exists.
• Leaders who invest in self-awareness are better equipped to navigate difficult conversations.
• Small moments of clarity and curiosity can prevent larger issues from becoming burnout, disengagement, or turnover.

1. Pay Attention When Something Feels Off

Many nonprofit leaders are so focused on solving problems that they ignore the early signals that something isn’t working.

Andrés encouraged participants to pay attention to those moments when a conversation leaves them feeling tense, frustrated, anxious, or exhausted. Rather than dismissing those reactions, he sees them as valuable information. He quotes Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor in her TED talk “My stroke of insight” where she says: 

“We tend to think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel. But biologically speaking, we are feeling creatures that think.”

Our bodies often notice misalignment before our minds can explain it. That doesn’t automatically mean something is wrong, but it does mean there is something worth exploring.

Before jumping into solutions, Andrés encourages leaders to slow down and get curious. What patterns keep repeating? What assumptions are you making? What information might still be missing? Those questions often reveal far more than immediately trying to fix the situation.

2. Don’t Assume It’s a People Problem

When team dynamics become strained, many organizations immediately focus on individuals.

Someone isn’t communicating well. Someone seems disengaged. Someone appears resistant to change.

While those explanations may be partially true, Andrés encouraged leaders to look beyond personalities and examine the systems surrounding them.

One of the most powerful moments in the conversation was his reminder that teams should start by examining goals before they focus on relationships. While going over the GRPI model, he reminded people that:

“The very first thing we have to start with is the goals. Are we all working towards the same thing?”

If people have different understandings of success, even highly capable teams can struggle. What looks like conflict may actually be confusion. What feels like resistance may simply be a lack of clarity.

Before assuming someone is the problem, leaders should ask whether everyone is actually working toward the same destination.

3. Get Clear on Priorities Before You Fix Culture

One of Andrés’ most practical suggestions was surprisingly simple.

Ask your team to anonymously answer one question:

What is our number one priority right now? (This could be framed for the year, the quarter, the month or week)

The exercise sounds straightforward, but the results are often revealing.

If everyone provides a different answer, you’ve likely uncovered an important source of misalignment. Team members may be working hard, communicating regularly, and showing up with good intentions, but if they’re operating from different priorities, tension is almost inevitable.

Rather than debating who is right, Andrés recommends using those responses as a starting point for conversation, and understanding the communication gaps and different perspectives

“The point is you’re making something invisible visible.”

Many nonprofit teams operate with implied priorities rather than shared priorities. The more explicit leaders can be about what matters most, the easier it becomes for people to make decisions, allocate resources, and support one another.

4. Build Trust Before You Expect Healthy Conflict

Nonprofit organizations often talk about improving communication, but Andrés argued that trust is usually the real issue. While sharing Patrick Lencioni’s model, he explained:

“Conflict is not bad. But you’ve got to have trust so you can have healthy conflict.”

Healthy teams disagree. They challenge ideas, debate priorities, and offer different perspectives. The goal isn’t to eliminate conflict. The goal is to create enough trust that people can engage in those conversations without feeling personally threatened.

Andrés described trust as being built on three foundations: expertise, consistency, and positive regard. People need to believe that you know what you’re doing, that you’ll follow through on your commitments, and that you genuinely care about them as people.

Trust is rarely built through a single retreat or team-building exercise. It develops through small actions over time. Showing up when you say you will. Following through on commitments. Giving people the benefit of the doubt. Looking for genuine points of connection with colleagues.

Those moments may feel small, but they compound.

5. The Most Important Leadership Work Happens Internally

When discussing the leadership skills that matter most during periods of tension, Andrés didn’t talk about strategic planning, project management, or communication techniques.

He talked about self-awareness.

“The number one skill you need is doing the inner work and increasing your emotional intelligence.”

When leaders haven’t examined their own triggers, assumptions, and reactions, it becomes much harder to navigate conflict productively. Instead of listening, we defend. Instead of being curious, we try to convince. Instead of creating space for solutions, we become part of the problem.

Whether it’s coaching, therapy, journaling, reflection, or another practice, Andrés believes leaders need to understand themselves before they can effectively support others.

The work is uncomfortable at times, but it creates the conditions for stronger leadership, healthier conversations, and more resilient teams.

A Practical Framework for Diagnosing Team Misalignment

One of the most useful frameworks Andrés shared was the GRPI model. Rather than immediately focusing on personalities or conflict, he encourages leaders to work through four areas in sequence. More often than not, what looks like a relationship problem starts as a lack of clarity around goals, roles, or processes.

Area to Explore	Questions to Ask
Goals	Are we aligned on our priorities and definition of success?
Roles	Does everyone understand their responsibilities and authority?
Processes	Are decisions and workflows clear and consistent?
Interpersonal Relationships	Is trust strong enough to support healthy conflict and collaboration?

What This Means for Your Organization

The next time your team feels off, resist the urge to immediately fix people.

Start by getting curious.

Look at your goals before you look at personalities. Clarify roles before assuming resistance. Examine processes before diagnosing communication issues. And remember that trust is often the foundation that allows everything else to function.

As Andrés reminded participants throughout the conversation, leadership is not about having all the answers. It’s about creating the conditions where difficult conversations can happen, assumptions can be challenged, and teams can find alignment together. It’s about facilitating conversations and asking open ended questions that open up possibility and invite people to step into their own leadership.

Because when leaders make the invisible visible, they’re far more likely to address small tensions before they become burnout, disengagement, or turnover.

Resources from Andrés Márquez-Lara

If this conversation resonated with you, Andrés shared a couple of resources that can help you continue exploring these ideas.

Andrés’ Linktree
A collection of Andrés’ articles, programs, resources, and ways to connect:

The Misalignment Meter
A practical tool designed to help leaders identify where misalignment may be showing up within their teams and organizations. It can be a useful starting point for conversations about goals, roles, processes, and relationships before challenges become larger issues.

As Andrés reminded us throughout the conversation, the goal isn’t to diagnose people. It’s to better understand the systems, relationships, and assumptions that shape how we work together.