Conservation's $1 Billion Leadership Problem. It’s time to Build a Better Boat.
Last week marked the 55th anniversary of Earth Day. For many of us in the environment, conservation, and climate spaces, it was a day spent honoring the scientists, advocates, organizers, and practitioners who have dedicated their careers, and in many cases their lives, to fighting climate change, protecting ecosystems, and securing the future of the planet's biodiversity. It was also a day for us to honor new generations of practitioners who bring an unparalleled sense of urgency, new skills, a unique world-view, and much-needed energy to the movement.
And yet, amid this celebration, those of us in the environmental sector must also reckon with a hard truth. While the environmental movement is gaining incredible new talent, it is simultaneously losing extraordinary capacity and billions of dollars in mission value due to toxic and toxic-adjacent workplace cultures. High turnover, burnout, discrimination, chronic overwork, poor communication, favoritism, bullying, harassment, pervasive microaggressions, and unmanaged conflict are rampant in the environmental sector. These behaviors are well-documented[1] and, collectively, undermine conservation and climate outcomes.
Consider that over approximately 10 years, 5 of the conservation sector’s most prominent US-based organizations had a combined operating budget exceeding $20 billion USD[2]. These same 5 organizations exited their CEOs for harassment, bullying, or retaliation against employees, or for failing to prevent (or, worse, enabling) such behaviors among rank-and-file leaders. If we assume a wildly conservative 5% annual loss in organizational revenue due to poor management, weak leadership, and unhealthy workplace cultures, the conservation sector quietly bled $1 billion USD over this 10-year period through these 5 organizations alone.
Where did the money go? Research shows that toxic cultures drive voluntary turnover rates up to 50% above industry averages, and, according to MIT Sloan, toxic culture is a more powerful predictor of attrition than compensation by a factor of 10. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has estimated that replacing an employee costs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary. Additional organizational costs stem from absenteeism and sick leave, legal and compliance costs, decision-making delays, and innovation loss. Employee disengagement alone can cost up to 20% of an employee's salary and benefits[4]. Collectively, these resources are being squandered on preventable organizational failures and could otherwise be used to protect ecosystems, biodiversity, and communities that rely on natural resources for survival.
Beyond financial impact, an unhealthy culture drains the energy, creativity, collaborative potential, and morale that conservation practitioners need to do their best work during these challenging times. Put simply: a toxic and dysfunctional culture is not an HR nuance but rather one of the most pressing conservation challenges of our time, and addressing it is one of the highest return-on-investments we can make.
A reason for Hope.
Consider this: recovering just 5% of lost organizational capacity across these five institutions, through stronger leadership and intentional culture recovery, could unlock nearly $100 million in additional mission value each year. We highlight these organizations because their cultural challenges have been visible to the public, but the broader opportunity across the sector is far greater. The largest 20 US-based environmental organizations alone account for roughly $4.4 billion in annual revenue[5]. A modest 5% improvement in culture and effectiveness across this group could translate into approximately $2.2 billion in additional impact over the next decade.
The Path Forward
The path to unlocking this latent capacity, and associated capital, is well defined by decades of culture-recovery research and the application of those findings in the for-profit sector. Said differently, the environmental sector does not have to reinvent the wheel. The following four priorities define the first steps that environmental organizations can and should take to advance culture recovery. Importantly, these are not programs or initiatives; they are definitive changes to governance structures and accountability mechanisms.
Hold the CEO and leadership team explicitly accountable for culture. Culture metrics should be tied to performance reviews and ultimately to compensation. Examples of metrics include employee engagement, retention, inclusion, and trust. Boards must oversee culture as a strategic asset. A 2022 McKinsey & Company report shows that companies that link leadership incentives to cultural outcomes achieve stronger organizational health and performance. In the environmental sector, CEOs and other organizational leaders must be held accountable not only to dollars raised, hectares protected, carbon sequestered, livelihoods created, or species recovered but also to how effectively they lead, how they show up as human beings in positions of power, and whether the people who work alongside them are better or worse for the experience.
Build Psychological Safety as a Measurable Organizational Outcome. Ensure continuous “listening systems” are in place that combine tools such as pulse surveys, structured stay/exit interviews, skip-level meetings, and anonymous surveys. Make results visible and act on them quickly. Gallup finds that employees who feel heard are 4.6× more likely to perform their best work. Qualtrics research shows continuous listening correlates with higher retention and engagement. Toxic cultures persist in part because people don't feel safe reporting problems. Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the term "team psychological safety," notes that organizations can "no longer lead through fear or manage through fear.” This type of management does not work as a motivator nor as an enabler of high performance. A 2024 meta-analysis of 185 research papers confirms that psychological safety enables employees to ask critical questions, seek help, report mistakes, raise concerns, and offer suggestions without fear of negative consequences. Simply stated, if teams are silent, it should be considered fear, not consent.
Disallow brilliant jerks. Environmental organizations have long relied on a particular archetype to fill leadership roles; one defined by high-performance coupled with extreme dysfunction. Gallup's State of the American Manager found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement scores, making the manager the single greatest predictor of team engagement. Google's Project Oxygen, published in Harvard Business Review, found that retention was more strongly tied to manager quality than to tenure, seniority, performance ratings, or promotions. Managers must be trained in coaching, feedback, and inclusion AND evaluated on those skills. Boards must make clear, through policy and through practice, that how someone leads is as important as what they produce. Boards must also ensure that when someone cannot or will not meet that standard, they will be removed regardless of their résumé or their relationships with donors.
Define and enforce behavioral norms throughout the organization. High-performing organizations define and model behavioral norms and enforce them at every level without exception, regardless of seniority, tenure, or perceived indispensability. This includes the Board itself. Harvard Business Review identifies clear behavioral norms as foundational to high-performing teams. Importantly, this means tackling not only toxic behaviors but also toxic agent behaviors such as microaggressions.
We are entering a moment of profound transformation. The scale and rate of the climate and biodiversity crises demand that conservation organizations operate with unprecedented effectiveness, collaboration, and innovation, especially as funding becomes harder to secure and increasingly challenging to sustain. In this moment, organizational health and leadership capacity are no longer secondary concerns; they are central determinants of conservation impact.
[1] Sull, D., Sull, C., & Zweig, B. (2022). Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the voluntary turnover rate for nonprofit organizations is almost twice as high as the overall labor force and nonprofit turnover is now hovering around 20% to 22% annually, compared to roughly 12% to 13% across other sectors, a gap that has held since the pandemic rather than correcting.
[2] This analysis draws on publicly reported workplace culture challenges across a representative set of major conservation organizations, including The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, National Audubon Society, Defenders of Wildlife, and Sierra Club. Public disclosures, internal reviews, and investigative reporting have highlighted issues including harassment, inequity, retaliation concerns, leadership accountability gaps, and broader organizational culture strain. Revenue estimates are based on publicly available financial filings and sector benchmarks; the assumed 5% impact represents a conservative proxy for productivity loss, turnover costs, and delayed program execution associated with workplace culture challenges.
[4] See id.
[5] Revenue figures compiled from IRS Form 990 filings and published annual reports for the 20 largest U.S.-based environmental organizations by revenue, as reported in the most recent available fiscal year. Organizations include The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Wildlife Conservation Society, Environmental Defense Fund, Conservation International, National Audubon Society, and others. Total reflects aggregate reported revenue.