Good Reads for Greater Impact: Strong Ground

CFA’s quarterly book recommendation guides readers toward sources that will help them strengthen leadership and achieve better results in their fundraising work.

Finding Strong Ground: Leadership Lessons Nonprofits Need Now

Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit
By Brené Brown (Random House, 2025)

The road to nonprofit leadership has never been clearly marked. Unlike the established pathways into law, medicine, or business, there has been no standard degree, no widely recognized pipeline, and no credential that signals readiness to lead a mission-driven organization. Most nonprofit executives, development directors, and board leaders have learned their craft the same way generations before them did: on the job, through mentorship and hard-won experience—and, for those committed to growing in the role, through a disciplined habit of lifelong learning and professional curiosity.

That commitment to learning has never mattered more. The nonprofit landscape is shifting faster than most leaders can comfortably absorb. The donor cliff looms. The great intergenerational wealth transfer is reshaping philanthropy in real time. Technological advances and the sudden acceleration of AI are forcing nonprofits to grapple with issues they couldn’t have imagined a decade ago. And beneath these visible forces lies a quieter but equally urgent challenge: how to build and sustain the teams that will carry organizations forward.

Today’s employees arrive with a different set of expectations. They want meaningful work, opportunities for personal and professional growth, and a visible path toward advancement. Leaders who dismiss those expectations as distractions risk losing exactly the people they most need to succeed.

This is the terrain Brené Brown explores in Strong Ground, and it is why this book belongs on the shelf of every nonprofit executive, development professional, and board member serious about leading well in a complicated moment.

Built on Research, Grounded in Experience

Brown holds the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work, where she has spent more than two decades conducting qualitative research on courage, vulnerability, shame, empathy, and human connection. She also serves as a Professor of Practice at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business—an appointment that reflects the applied leadership dimension of her work.

She is not, in other words, a business consultant who stumbled into leadership theory. She is a researcher whose work on human behavior naturally led to the question of what courageous leadership looks like inside real organizations.

Strong Ground grows out of six years of work developing and delivering Brown’s Dare to Lead curriculum to tens of thousands of leaders around the world. The book distills lessons drawn from that work into a practitioner’s guide that speaks directly to the realities leaders face inside organizations.

The book’s central metaphor is memorable. While rehabilitating a sports injury, Brown’s trainer instructed her to “find the ground”—to build genuine strength by stabilizing the body rather than compensating around weakness. Brown extends that insight into organizational life. Leaders who layer new strategies on top of unstable foundations do not solve their problems; they amplify them. Real transformation begins when leaders find their organization’s strong ground and build from that foundation.

A Primer on Cutting-Edge Approaches to Leadership

One of the book’s most valuable features is the way Brown brings other voices in leadership into the conversation. She draws on discussions with writers and practitioners whose work is shaping modern leadership practice. Among them are Adam Grant, whose research examines how intellectual humility and generosity shape strong organizational cultures; Daniel Pink, whose research on motivation reshaped how leaders think about autonomy, mastery, and purpose; and Aiko Bethea, a leadership strategist whose work centers on values-driven leadership and accountable organizational cultures.

Each of these thinkers brings a distinct perspective to the conversation, and each has a substantial body of work beyond what appears in these pages. In that sense, Strong Ground functions not only as a leadership guide but also as a curated introduction to a wider body of thinking that nonprofit leaders can draw on as they strengthen their organizations.

Taken together, these conversations point toward a model of leadership that is both demanding and deeply human—one that holds courage and care together, recognizes the hunger for meaning in work, and understands that strong organizations are built not through strategy alone but through the trust and relationships that allow people to do their best work.

For nonprofit leaders, the takeaway is clear: the theories of  leadership shaping many high-performing companies are just as relevant—perhaps even more so—in mission-driven institutions. The nonprofit sector has always been hungry for practical wisdom on leadership. Strong Ground delivers it.

How CFA Can Help

At Creative Fundraising Advisors, strategic planning and leadership coaching are components of several of our service lines because we know the strength of an organization’s fundraising is inseparable from the strength of its leadership. If your organization is navigating change, strengthening its team, or preparing for its next phase of growth, we would welcome the opportunity to help. Contact CFA to learn what strategic advantages you might leverage for the continued success of your nonprofit.

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