Journal Article: Nothing Succeeds Like Succession
Kim Jonker & William F. Meehan III
Stanford Social Innovation Review
One test of a nonprofit organization hinges on whether it can manage a difficult leadership transition.
Excerpt

Many nonprofit executive directors, and indeed many other leaders as well, first consider the notion of their professional mortality when they reach their late fifties or sixties. All too often, they react with denial, and with an urge to rear back and tighten their grip on power. At about the same time, other responsible parties within an organization will begin to consider when and how to replace a top leader who is nearing the end of his or her prime. The result is a primal human conflict that looms as one of the most difficult challenges that a nonprofit organization will face. In the end, however, the need to plan for the future of an organization must win out.

Intentional succession planning is imperative not only in organizations with an executive director who is heading toward retirement age, but in every kind of organization. That’s particularly true in cases where a dynamic and visionary founding leader remains at the helm.    The need for a “founder transition”—a transfer of power to a more professionalized second generation of leadership—often comes far earlier than the moment when a founder is inclined to embrace it. The failure to manage such a transition successfully is what kills most entrepreneurial ventures, be they social or commercial. In any context, founder transitions are fraught with potential challenges, and those challenges pivot around highly emotional life-and-death issues that are at least as much personal as they are institutional.

Succession planning, in fact, is one of the most frequently requested topics of discussion at the annual retreat for recipients of the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership that we facilitate. Even the remarkable people and organizations that have won this prize struggle with handling leadership transitions. In part, that is because many Kravis Prize organizations have founders who are still active.

The dominant personality traits of those who build great social organizations include a visionary approach to society and an ability to see through constraints—the constraints of time, in particular. Many nonprofit leaders talk about the future of their organization in the present tense, as if their vision for that future had already come to pass. And with those traits comes a deep reluctance to see one’s mortality as something to plan for.

Nonprofit leaders can delay or neglect succession planning, but succession itself is unavoidable. Here, then, are three principles that typify nonprofits that are not only effective but also enduring.

Get Real
Stakeholders in an organization should find out if their founder or executive director has a realistic sense of when and how succession should occur. Kravis Prize recipient Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of BRAC, is one visionary leader who was able to develop realistic expectations in this area. BRAC, founded in 1972, is the largest nonprofit in the world. It reaches more than 100 million people per year in Bangladesh and across the world through anti-poverty, health care, and education programs. Abed served as executive director of BRAC until 2000, but he started identifying potential successors as early as 1990. Since 2000, BRAC has had three executive directors, and BRAC International (which oversees programs in 11 countries outside Bangladesh) has had three directors as well. Abed now serves as chair of the organization. “I have tried to ensure succession at BRAC without thinking about myself,” he says. “I wanted to address succession from the inside by gradually taking steps backwards and seeing how things worked out. I believe an organization can have more than one leader; in fact, leadership roles should be well dispersed throughout an organization.”…

…That said, we recognize that there are exceptions to every rule. Fazle Abed, as we noted, stepped down as executive director of BRAC but continues to serves as chairman of that organization, and by all accounts that arrangement appears to be working. “BRAC has benefited from the long-term commitment and continuity of its leadership,” says Susan Davis, founding president and CEO of BRACUSA. To emphasize that point, Davis notes that the founding chair of BRAC remains on the BRAC board and that the board elected a former BRAC deputy executive director to serve as its vice chair.

Deliberate, advance succession planning is important not only for the founder or executive director role, but also for other key positions on the senior management team of an organization. Focusing only on the founder “does an organization a disservice,” Abed argues. “BRAC now conducts succession planning at every level. We learned that we must pay attention to the pipeline.” Abed cites an occasion when that lesson was brought home for him: “We were taken by surprise when a critical member of the senior management team passed away unexpectedly in 2010. He had been my right-hand person since 1976. Fortunately, we had some bench strength. But we learned firsthand the importance of succession planning.”…

Full text at http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/nothing_succeeds_like_succession