January 12, 2006 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Planning a change in leadership is tricky for most nonprofit groups. Following are tips from nonprofit consultants on the best ways to avoid stumbles:
Consider the charity’s needs first. Many nonprofit organizations get bogged down trying to
identify who their next leader will be without first undergoing a candid, in-depth evaluation of how the organization has changed and what characteristics the next executive director should have.
“So many organizations put out the job description and then have the discussion over where the organization is going over a pile of résumés,” says Margaret Donohoe, a consultant at Leadership In Transition, a San Jose company.
“A lot of conversation needs to happen: Where are we going? What do we need?” Ms. Donohoe says. “The discussion should happen before the job description, and the direction of the organization should influence the job description. The best thing is for organizations to be strategic rather than engage in an accidental leadership transition, which is a lot of what happens.”
Let the board pick the successor. Some departing leaders cause trouble when they designate a person to be the next chief executive before the board has a chance to weigh in, says Tom Adams, president of TransitionGuides, a Silver Spring, Md., company.
“People have been hired to be successors, but when it comes time for the board to make a decision, they do not meet the criteria,” says Mr. Adams. “You have an angry deputy who feels set up and an angry board who feels it wasn’t the executive’s job to pick his or her own successor. While there are exceptions, trying to pick your own successor generally does not work.”
Other problems arise when a long-time executive director or founder dominates the board’s efforts to find a new leader, says Susan Egmont, a Boston consultant who specializes in helping charities through difficult staff changes.
“Founders like to be on search committees, and the board often asks them to be,” she says. “This is a recipe for a failed or difficult search.”
Ms. Egmont says she worked with one charity that insisted that its founder be on the search committee, and the woman rejected five qualified applicants for her job.
“She found a reason why every finalist wouldn’t work,” recalls Ms. Egmont. “Finally the search committee gave up and hired an interim director. That gave the founder time to move on, and they were eventually able to hire someone without interference.”
An interim director, she adds, can be a useful approach when an organization needs to create distance between an outgoing executive and its next leader.
Keep board members involved. Many boards mistakenly assume that their work in a transition is done once the executive director is hired, says John Beeson, a Kansas City, Mo., consultant who provides succession-planning assistance to Fortune 500 companies and some charities.
“The board thinks they can step back, or they feel exhausted,” he says. “But whether an internal or external person is hired, there is work to be done after they come on board.”
Most new executives need an orientation period of several months to a year, Mr. Beeson says. During that period, the new leader should set objectives with guidance and oversight from board members, who should also regularly examine how the executive is fitting into the job, offering help where needed.
One way to avoid overburdening board members during an executive change, consultants say, is to have them form two committees: a search committee, which takes responsibility for finding and recruiting qualified candidates, and another group, sometimes called a transition committee, that works with the new leader after he or she is hired.
Steven McCullough, executive director at Bethel New Life, a Chicago charity that provides low-cost housing and other services, worked with a transition committee for six months after taking his job in June.
In monthly meetings with the committee, Mr. McCullough says, he provided reports on his progress to meet nine goals he and the board had agreed on, such as hiring a new chief financial officer, recruiting fund raisers to help the group become more aggressive in seeking private gifts, and evaluating programs offered by the organization.
Don’t automatically promote a deputy. A deputy or associate director is often tapped to take over when an executive leaves. While that type of succession can work, it frequently does not, says Mr. Beeson.
“CEO’s may want to reward a great Number Two, but it is a huge leap from being a senior vice president to CEO, and the person often does not have the breadth of understanding of the organization,” Mr. Beeson says. “Under pressure, a lot of these people will go back to their natural tendencies and skills, and that’s counterproductive.”
Deputy directors are often hired because their skills complement those of the chief executive, notes Tim Wolfred, director of executive leadership services at CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, a San Francisco consulting group. “The executive director is the schmoozer and they hire a deputy to keep the trains running on time, but this is not the right person to lead the organization. This person doesn’t have the personality or skill set.”
Adopt a detailed, written plan. “If it isn’t written, there is no succession plan,” says Ms. Egmont. Charities “may think they have a plan,” she says, “but if you ask the executive director and the board chair, they will have different plans. Until you write it and get it approved, it doesn’t exist.”
Many succession plans are not detailed enough, which leaves board members and employees without the tools they need to carry out a smooth transition to a new leader, consultants say.
Pair new leaders with mentors. When Karen Haren became the executive director of Harvesters six years ago, the Kansas City, Mo., food bank had Mr. Beeson, the succession-planning consultant, meet with her monthly for six months on a pro-bono basis.
“He would share strategies, he was a coach, he even sat down with me and the board president and talked about ways of working together,” says Ms. Haren. “It was reassuring to know I had someone backing me.”
Some new executive directors make a point of meeting regularly with leaders of other charities.
When Ron Okun of the Men’s Resource Center for Change, in Amherst, Mass., learned that the founder of his organization was taking a sabbatical and he would assume some of his boss’s duties, he contacted several local charity leaders to see if they wanted to meet. Now, two years later, he still meets with four of the executives every two or three weeks.
“This has really worked well,” says Mr. Okun, who was named executive director of his charity, which works to end violence. “It is easier to hear ideas and suggestions from colleagues sitting in the same seat than it might be from someone on your board or staff.”
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Two Web sites offer numerous free resources for charities dealing with leadership turnover. They are TransitionGuides (http://www.transitionguides.com/resources/resources.htm) and CompassPoint Nonprofit Services (http://www4.compasspoint.org).
