January 12, 2006 | Read Time: 5 minutes
Sister Mary Paul Janchill, 85, retired two years ago from the top job at the Center for Family Life, a Brooklyn
social-services charity that she helped found in 1978. But the organization is still part of her daily life.
The center, which serves more than 4,000 families each year, is now run by two directors, Julia Jean-Francois and Julie Stein Brockway. But Sister Mary Paul, a Catholic nun who maintains a top-floor apartment at the charity, still attends policy meetings, serves as the center’s advocate in city-planning meetings, and advises case workers in its family-counseling program.
“I feel privileged to stay here, and I am careful not to stay in any controlling position,” she says. “I had thought I would leave because it was expected, but I don’t think I really wanted to.”
Who Is in Charge?
Like Sister Mary Paul, some longtime or founding executive directors stay closely involved with their organizations after stepping down from the top job.
And as charities confront a dearth of qualified leaders — a shortage that is expected to grow more acute over the next 10 to 15 years — they may increasingly ask chief executives to keep working in some fashion with the nonprofit organizations they leave.
But consultants who help charities with succession planning and executive departures say it is rare for such arrangements to work well, especially when they involve the person who started the charity.
“Founder transitions are almost always very, very difficult,” says Susan Egmont, a Boston consultant who has advised 80 charities that have lost chief executives, most of them founders.
Many founders, she notes, find it threatening to think about their successors, and some avoid or even sabotage planning for an organizational future that doesn’t involve them. Meanwhile, many charities continue to depend heavily on the fund-raising prowess of founders, as well as their other skills, and that can keep organizations from making a healthy transition to a new leader.
Founders of charities often assume that they will be on the charity’s board after leaving, but that can put the incoming executive in the uncomfortable position of reporting to a former leader who continues to call the shots, says Ms. Egmont.
“When they are discouraged from serving on the board, well, then they want to be a consultant,” she says. “Sometimes it is hard to set a date and really, really leave.”
Ms. Egmont says she once worked on a particularly challenging situation with a social-services group whose executive had been on the job for nearly 40 years. Over that time, he recruited a board with no term limits, consisting mostly of friends he had known since childhood.
“The founder said he would be there for two weeks after the new person came, but he never quit coming to work,” says Ms. Egmont. “Four months after the new executive came, he was still coming in most days. All this was extremely difficult for the new executive. The new executive would walk into a board meeting and find the founder there.”
Eventually, after the founder ignored several requests to “take a rest,” a lawyer on the charity’s board ordered him off the premises, says Ms. Egmont. “This is an extreme example, but it is not unusual for people to have a horrible time with this.”
For many departing founders and longtime executives, the most difficult issues to confront are the personal ones.
“What you have to think about is your own future. Emotionally, it is hard to deal with,” says Lynda Steele, 57, who plans to retire in a few years as executive director of the Community Association for Rehabilitation, in Palo Alto, Calif. “If you are living and breathing what you do every day in your nonprofit, it is difficult to imagine not having that in your life.”
Management Training
To assist founders and longtime charity leaders, some grant makers and consulting companies have started offering training. Some of the workshops help founders enhance their management style, by turning over control of certain operations, for example. Others help executives decide whether it is time for them to leave.
TransitionGuides, a Silver Spring, Md., company, with aid from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, created a two-day “Next Steps” workshop for executives who are contemplating quitting. The workshop, which covers topics such as succession planning, also teaches executives how to strengthen operations so that their groups are prepared for and able to survive their departure.
For leaders who want to keep working with their organizations after leaving their job, experts say, the key to success is mutual agreement among the departing and incoming leaders and their board, says Tom Adams, president of TransitionGuides. The situation works best, he says, when “the incoming executive has a real voice in the decision to continue to involve the departing executive, not just a token consent to a decision made in advance by the departing executive and the board.”
But even in the best circumstances, continuing to work at their charities is a delicate balancing act for most founders.
“It is a real challenge both professionally and personally to let go of something that has consumed me for many, many years,” admits Sister Mary Paul. “I don’t think I could ever advise someone in my position to stay or not stay. The average person would find it necessary to leave, but I have the happy experience of being an exception.”
