The Anchor

Who grounds the organization

After nearly three decades of consulting with nonprofit organizations, I’ve begun noticing the same person over and over again. She rarely has an impressive title. She usually works closest to the people the organization exists to serve. She’s been with the organization for years, sometimes decades. She occupies the lower end of the organizational chart and earns far less than her contribution would suggest. Yet everyone depends on her.

Source: vecteezy.com

She is the person everyone turns to when they need an answer that isn’t written down. She remembers why a policy exists, which community partner can be counted on in a crisis, and how the organization survived its last funding emergency. She knows the clients by name, understands the community’s culture, and quietly notices when a coworker is on the verge of burnout. If a new executive director wants to understand how the organization really works, this is the person they should spend time with.

I’ve started referring to her as the Organizational Anchor.

The Organizational Anchor holds together much more than institutional knowledge. She often carries the emotional center of the organization. She mentors new employees, calms conflicts before they become grievances, reassures anxious staff after another difficult board meeting, and helps everyone believe the mission is still possible after another funding cut. When people leave, she preserves continuity. When leaders change, she provides stability. When uncertainty grows, she quietly helps everyone stay connected.

I hypothesize that nonprofit organizations often rely on Organizational Anchors far more than they realize. In return, these employees receive something that isn’t reflected in their paycheck: informal authority, trust, influence, and a sense of job security that comes from being indispensable. The exchange may not be intentional, but over time it becomes deeply inequitable because the organization receives executive-level value while compensating frontline labor.

Interestingly, researchers have been studying aspects of this phenomenon for years, although, to my knowledge, they haven’t described this particular organizational role.

Behavioral economist Linda Babcock and her colleagues Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart coined the terms “office housework” and “non-promotable work.” Their research demonstrates that women are disproportionately asked, or volunteer, to perform the invisible tasks that keep organizations functioning but rarely lead to promotion. They mentor new employees, organize celebrations, smooth interpersonal conflict, onboard new staff, and help others succeed. These tasks are essential to organizational health, yet because they don’t generate obvious metrics, they are often overlooked during performance reviews and compensation decisions.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild introduced the concept of emotional labor in her groundbreaking book The Managed Heart. She described the often invisible work of managing one’s own emotions while also regulating the emotions of others. Although Hochschild studied airline employees, anyone who has worked in a nonprofit will immediately recognize the phenomenon. Someone must comfort the grieving family, reassure the frightened client, de-escalate the angry community member, and absorb the anxiety that inevitably accompanies uncertainty and scarcity.

Organizations frequently describe these employees by saying, “She’s just naturally good with people.” I hear something different. I hear an organization mistaking a highly developed professional competency for a personality trait.

That distinction matters because personality isn’t compensated. Expertise should be.

Another pattern I’ve noticed is that the Organizational Anchor is often a woman of color. While this observation comes from my own consulting experience, research helps explain why this pattern may emerge.

Sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield has documented how women of color frequently perform additional relational and emotional labor in organizations. They are often expected to mentor colleagues, help navigate conversations about race, represent the community, build trust with clients, and repair relationships that extend well beyond their formal job descriptions. Likewise, Patricia Hill Collins reminds us that race and gender cannot be understood independently. Expectations surrounding care, strength, service, and community often converge in ways that create additional invisible responsibilities for women of color.

At the organizational level, Joan Acker’s theory of gendered organizations provides another important piece of the puzzle. Acker argued that organizations are never truly neutral. They are structured to recognize and reward certain kinds of work while rendering other equally essential contributions nearly invisible. Budgets, grant revenue, strategic plans, and dashboards are easy to measure. Institutional memory, trust, relationship repair, psychological safety, and community credibility are not. Yet anyone who has led an organization through a crisis knows which set of assets ultimately determines whether the organization survives.

When I hear a leader say, “We couldn’t survive without her,” I no longer hear only gratitude. I hear organizational dependence. If someone is simultaneously indispensable, underpaid, excluded from formal authority, and carrying work that no one else fully understands, the issue isn’t simply employee recognition. It’s organizational design.

The solution isn’t to celebrate Organizational Anchors for their loyalty or resilience. In fact, I worry that doing so romanticizes a structural problem. Instead, leaders should ask harder questions. How much of our institutional knowledge resides in one person? How much emotional labor are we expecting without acknowledging it? Are we rewarding the people who generate measurable outputs while overlooking those who create the conditions that make those outputs possible?