Lab Notes: The Mid-Year Reckoning
June 2026 Essential Leadership Lab Cohort
We are halfway through 2026. Not almost halfway. Not approaching the midpoint. Halfway. Whatever you said you were going to do in January, you’ve had six months to do it. And in this month’s Essential Leadership Lab cohorts, we stopped moving long enough to look back, so we can move forward with intention.
This is the June installment of Lab Notes, our monthly series turning the high-level discussions of the Essential Leadership Lab into actionable insights for the broader nonprofit community. This month, we moved past the polished updates and assessed the gap between our intentions and our reality.
We opened each of our June cohort sessions with a camera-on pulse check, a format returning members recognized from January. Participants turned their cameras off, then back on if a statement applied to them. The prompts ranged from acknowledging unexpected pivots and feeling behind, to recognizing pride in organizational accomplishments, to naming something they knew they needed to address but had been putting off.
The exercise did what it always does: it made the invisible visible. No one is alone in any of this.
By June, many leaders find themselves in the daily operational grind, having lost the thread of the intentions they set in January. We used a four-quadrant framework, dubbed the Reckoning Grid, to audit the first six months of the year. A few themes arose consistently across cohorts:
Avoidance is a short-term strategy. The answer to, “What’s the most important thing I need to focus on in H2 (the second half of the year)?” was consistently also what showed up in the “What have I been avoiding?” responses. The inevitability of the hard conversation, validation of an uncomfortable hunch, or frustratingly inefficient task doesn’t go away – it just hovers. And, worse, festers. Doing can be the antidote to dreading.
Control the controllables. Good intentions are built on conditional assumptions. One participant reflected on our January Lab when we discussed guiding words for the year. Her original word required a pivot in the first half of the year when organizational shifts changed what was most needed from leadership. Rather than abandoning her intention, she refined it, moving from an aspirational word to a more operational one that honors both where she is and where she intends to go. Stubborn leadership laments the plan that didn’t survive. Advanced leadership adapts to the one that will.
Personal growth is on the back burner. Multiple leaders acknowledged putting their own professional development aside to focus entirely on their organizations and teams. It’s a familiar trap in the nonprofit sector; we deprioritize the very thing that sustains our leadership capacity.
Some of what leaders are avoiding is a rational response to an irrational environment. The most adaptive executives described a counterintuitive response to external pressure: doing less, but better. Reducing partnerships, sunsetting programs, and concentrating resources on core mission impact.
What are they emphatically defending? The capacity-building engines: innovation budgets and fundraising teams.
The H2 Commitment
Referring to the second half of the year as “the rest of the year” shortchanges the opportunity we have to make meaningful progress in six months – the same timeframe that seemed full of possibilities six months ago as 2025 turned to 2026. “H2” is a distinct half with its own scoreboard and its own opportunity for intentional leadership.
To close our Lab, we named a specific, time-bound commitment: “By September 15th, I will ______ [specific action], because my H2 focus is ______ [priority], and the thing I’m no longer willing to avoid is ______.“
The commitments that emerged from our cohorts were concrete and measurable, as were the one-word themes that leaders shared: REINVIGORATION. CREATE. RESILIENT. CALIBRATION. CLARITY. INTENTIONALITY.
These aren’t resolutions. They are the strategic anchors these leaders are choosing to carry into the second half of 2026. The next six months could be hard – why would we expect otherwise? But we get to choose how, where, and when we show up.
Lab Notes is a monthly series sharing insights from TNPA’s Essential Leadership Lab, a virtual cohort program for senior nonprofit leaders. Enrollment opens three times per year; our next enrollment period is scheduled in October.
Author: Shannon McCracken
Shannon McCracken is the founding President and CEO at The Nonprofit Alliance.
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