Two ways to outgrow your own HR practices
Growth in the nonprofit and public sector rarely looks like a straightforward merger or acquisition. More often, it looks like partnering with other agencies to deliver a program together, or growing organically inside one organization over several years. Either way, that tends to be the moment an organization's HR practices get tested, and outside expertise is worth more than it would have been a year earlier.
Two examples from my own work show what that support can look like: one from a group of agencies partnering for the first time, and one from an organization that grew steadily over many years.
When growth means partnering with other agencies
A handful of community organizations decided to deliver a program together for the first time, each bringing its own culture, its own way of doing things, and its own staff on its own payroll. None of them had operated as one system before.
For this new joint model to work, a frontline worker from one agency needed to hand a client to a case manager from another without either of them wondering what "client-centred" or "trauma-informed" actually meant in practice. It meant a shared competency model, a joint operating manual, and a common orientation, so a new hire's first day looked the same no matter which of the partner agencies signed their paycheque.
No single one of those agencies could have built that shared infrastructure on its own, even with a strong internal HR team. Not because their staff weren't capable, but because whatever they built would have looked like their agency's standards being imposed on the others. Getting multiple organizations to agree on a shared competency model needed someone with no stake in whose version won.
When growth is more gradual
Growth doesn't always look like several agencies joining forces. It is just as often one organization quietly outgrowing its own systems over several years. A women's services organization asked for help with pay equity. The review found that at the pace the organization was on, meaningful pay equity was many years further off than anyone expected.
That is not really a pay equity problem. It is what happens when an organization keeps growing and serving its community well, while the HR practices underneath it never get revisited, because nobody inside has the time or the outside vantage point to notice how far behind they have fallen. A closer look at how the organization was actually doing turned up real strengths alongside gaps nobody inside had flagged as a priority, the kind of pattern that tends to surface only once someone from outside looks closely.
Why outside expertise helps either way
Internal HR capacity, where it exists at all, is usually sized for steady state, not for building something new. In a partnership, that shows up as a neutrality problem, since nobody inside any of the agencies is positioned to lead something the others will actually accept. In an organization growing on its own, it is a matter of perspective as much as time, since nobody inside has stood back far enough to see how much has quietly fallen behind.
The shape of that outside help still varies. Sometimes it is highly specialized: building a competency model that holds across several partner cultures, or running a pay equity review with enough independent credibility that a Board trusts the findings. Sometimes it is much simpler, extra hands to move volume and keep a hiring process from stalling. Most requests land somewhere on that range, and most of them show up at exactly the moment an organization is growing, whether that growth came from adding people or from joining forces with others.
Susan Underhill is the founder of Connor Claire Group, a policy and management consulting firm working with government and non-profit organizations across Canada.