How to plan your own succession
What I learned from planning my departure after 12 years running the Freedom Fund.
By Nick Grono
Contributor
August 14, 2026 | Read Time: 8 minutes
A nonprofit is at its most vulnerable when a long-serving chief executive leaves. Most in the sector recognize this, yet few boards prepare for it — and the CEO, the person best placed to prepare the ground for their own departure, is often the one least keen to contemplate it. That’s not surprising: Departures raise existential questions of identity and self-worth. But leaders and boards don’t do their organizations any favors by turning a blind eye to one of their fundamental responsibilities.
I know, as I’ve spent the last year working with my board to prepare for my own departure. After almost 12 years running the Freedom Fund, I told the board late last year I would leave at the end of 2026. In June it announced my successor, an internal appointment, and she will become CEO on December 1. Here’s what I learned during this succession process.
Go before you’re asked to.
I love my job. I was under no pressure to go — in fact the board strongly favored stability. I was the only CEO board members had known: As the Freedom Fund’s first staff member and inaugural CEO back in January 2014, I had grown the organization from a standing start into a collaborative fund of 70 staff across 12 countries, funding some 200 frontline partners. Despite a brutal fundraising environment we were in robust financial health, thanks to longstanding anchor donors and a second, very generous gift from MacKenzie Scott. We had just signed off on a bold new strategy.
So it was easy to tell myself the organization was thriving under my leadership and would carry on that way as long as I stayed. But long tenure does not guarantee continued success, and the longer a leader stays the harder it becomes for whoever comes next. Our sector is full of organizations that spiraled once a founder or long-serving chief executive finally left.
I was also beginning to sense I wasn’t bringing quite the same energy to the role as a few years earlier, and could see real value in handing over the reins to someone with fresh experience, a different perspective, and the ambition to lead the organization to even greater impact.
Figure out your next move before you announce.
Holding a vague intention to leave is easy enough; committing to a fixed departure date with your board is more existential. Pulling that trigger was the hardest part for me — and what made it feasible was first working out what came next.
Two pieces of writing helped. Herminia Ibarra’s Working Identity, the best account of job transitions I’ve come across, explains how people act their way into new careers — running small experiments with possible versions of themselves and noticing which resonate.
My own experiment was writing a book on nonprofit leadership, a decision influenced by Arthur Brooks’s 2019 Atlantic essay “Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think.” The response, and the leaders who got in touch, gave me more clarity than any reflection would have. I resolved to set up a new organization to support the next generation of nonprofit leaders through executive coaching and peer leadership circles.
If anything, letting go of a role I love has sharpened my appetite for what comes next.
Having somewhere to go removed the biggest constraint on timing. Most leaders leave when the next job appears, so their departure date is hostage to that job. Mine was not: I could pick a date that suited the Freedom Fund and work backward from it. For any departing CEO thinking of a new venture or consulting, that is a huge gift to the process.
Give your board a full year’s notice.
Having decided what would come next, I gave my board 12 months’ notice. A year gives a board time to plan properly — to explore options, weigh internal recruitment against external, and design a process it believes serves the organization, instead of scrambling to fill a hole.
It created space for everything else on this list. The board’s response was entirely supportive: grateful I was preparing to leave proactively after a long tenure, and — conscious that rushed transitions can go badly — in no hurry.
Build the bench long before you need it.
The board decided to run an internal search first, going external only if that failed. That option existed because of hiring decisions in previous years: Two of my three senior colleagues had been chief executives themselves, and the third had served as an interim CEO. The evidence supports going internal where you have a strong bench. External hires take roughly twice as long to get up to speed, and a significant proportion fail within their first 18 months, while internal candidates already know the funders, the partners, the culture, and where the problems are buried.
A long-serving leader with no plausible internal successor, by contrast, has a recruitment problem that needs addressing long before departure. It’s also a good reason to hire people who could take your job.
Test your internal candidates against the market.
An internal appointment has its risks. Staff may wonder whether it was a stitch-up; funders may wonder whether the board really looked for the best candidate; worst of all, the appointee may carry that doubt into the job. Our board tackled this by hiring a senior partner at an international search firm to advise on the process, conduct interviews, run psychometric assessment, and benchmark the internal candidates against the external market. The rigor served the successful candidate as much as the organization.
The result was that our managing director of programs, Havovi Wadia, was selected unanimously in June. Having previously led a nonprofit in India to support vulnerable girls and women, she brings deep knowledge of frontline partnership and is not stepping into her first CEO role. She is also deeply respected by staff and partners.
Backfill your successor’s job before you go.
If your successor is an internal appointment, filling their old job should be a priority. Havovi currently manages all our programs and most of our staff. Move too slowly and she would spend her first months as CEO also doing her old job — two big jobs at precisely the moment she should be doing one of them properly.
So we are recruiting her replacement now, aiming to have a new managing director of programs in place before she steps up in December, plus an internal interim director to carry some of that load during the handover.
That burden is specific to internal appointments. Nobody expects an externally hired chief executive to keep covering a job elsewhere, but when a board promotes from within, the assumption that the appointee will keep an eye on her old brief is so natural it is rarely challenged. Preparing for it shaped how much notice I gave the board, since I suspected they might lean internal.
Walk your successor into every key relationship.
Twelve years of funder and partner relationships are organizational assets that I hold personally; leaving without transferring them would risk taking them with me, to the detriment of my successor and the organization. So over the coming months I am introducing Havovi to funders and key partners in her new capacity — meetings she leads and I attend — so people are working with her while I am still around to support the handover.
There is another decision to make before your last day: what your role will be once you have gone. Mine will be a clean break — no board seat and no standing advisory role. An outgoing chief executive who stays ambiguously available becomes a problem for their successor.
Match the process to your budget.
Many nonprofits don’t have the luxury of affording international search firms and the other resources that went into ours.
But the approach readily adapts. It worked for a global nonprofit with a $25 million budget; endowed foundations may spend far more, and small domestic nonprofits a fraction. The key is fitting the process to your resources.
Expect the identity questions.
Everything above can be planned. What could not were the existential questions running through the process, sharpest after my successor was announced. Who am I when I am not the CEO of the Freedom Fund? What is my worth outside a role that has shaped much of my adult life?
My concerns have not been borne out. If anything, letting go of a role I love has sharpened my appetite for what comes next. And the questions only get harder the longer they are left: A leader who cannot imagine life outside the job after 12 years will not find it easier after 15.
Knowing when to leave is a key part of the job. Staying too long is one of the most common, and most avoidable, ways good leaders let down the organizations they built. Stepping down while things are going well is among the hardest things a leader can do — and the ultimate act of service to their organization and mission.
