Rebuilding Morale When the Team Has Lost Heart: Trust, Clarity and Purpose
3 September 2025There’s a story about John F. Kennedy visiting NASA in the 1960s. He stopped to chat with a janitor and asked what his job was. The janitor supposedly replied: “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
It’s almost certainly an urban myth, but it survives because it captures something powerful. At its best, rebuilding team morale comes from knowing how your work connects to a bigger purpose.
That’s easy to imagine in NASA’s case. In charities, however, the challenge is often much tougher. Fundraising teams and frontline service teams can feel like they are facing in opposite directions. The people who use the services are rarely the ones who pay for them, and the people who fund them don’t experience them directly. Aligning everyone around a shared purpose is difficult. Which means that when morale does collapse, it takes careful leadership to rebuild it.
1. Listen Before You Act
Low morale isn’t fixed by a motivational poster or a “Fun Friday.” I’ve seen first-hand how quick fixes such as away days, rigid rules, or gimmicks can backfire and make things worse.
When I took on the leadership of a frontline service team that arranged personalised experiences for people living with serious illness, they were demoralised. Years of “salami-sliced” budget cuts had left them under pressure. Odd team-building initiatives, petty restrictions, and the expectation to “bash out” experiences quickly had drained their pride in the work.
So, the first step was simply to listen. I asked the team what frustrated them, what they valued, and what their clients valued. I asked beneficiaries the same. What emerged was striking: the most powerful part of the service wasn’t the cost or glamour of each experience. It was the time and care the team put into understanding each person as an individual.
2. Remove Frustrations
Having listened, I acted. I removed the unnecessary rules, stopped the gimmicks, and scrapped the arbitrary restrictions. I gave the team flexibility to spend what they needed, confident that overall costs would actually fall if they focused on meaningful experiences rather than box-ticking.
And they did. Satisfaction among beneficiaries rose, costs fell, and the team rediscovered pride in their work.
3. Reconnect to Purpose: A Key Step in Rebuilding Team Morale
Equally important, we changed how we spoke about the work. These weren’t “treats” or “wishes,” nice extras for people in tough times. They were empowering experiences that helped people face illness with strength. That shift in language helped the team see their work differently, and it gave fundraisers a far more compelling story to share.
This is where morale truly rebuilt itself: when staff could see both the impact on beneficiaries and the way it unlocked support from donors. The dynamics in commercial organisations are different, but the lessons for rebuilding team morale are the same. Listen first, act on what matters, reconnect people to a shared purpose, and celebrate progress.
4. Celebrate Progress
With the pressure eased and the purpose restored, we celebrated small wins. Every positive story from a beneficiary, every encouraging comment from a fundraiser, was shared. Those moments reinforced the idea that everyone’s contribution mattered.
A Sporting Analogy (of course)
Anyone who knows me knows I sneak in a sporting analogy whenever I think I can get away with it. And this is one of those occasions.
Take Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson. In later years it became clear that many of the players didn’t always get on personally. But they were united in their focus on winning. That clarity of purpose allowed them to put aside differences and become serial champions.
If alignment is possible in a charity, where service and income can point in opposite directions, then in commercial organisations, where customers and payers are usually the same people, leaders have a clearer path to sustaining morale.
It’s the same with organisations of every kind. When trust is rebuilt, frustrations are cleared, and purpose is clear, rebuilding team morale doesn’t just restore energy. It powers performance. In charities, achieving this alignment can be one of the hardest challenges. In business, the line of sight to purpose is usually clearer. The real question is whether leaders choose to nurture it.
Ready to re-energise your team? Explore how we work with people to make change stick
[Featured image credit: Photo by Marcelo Chagas on pexels.com]
