There is a trend in nonprofit and association leadership that can’t be explained by the usual patterns of churn: many senior executives are retiring ahead of schedule or stepping down from top leadership roles.
Research in the corporate sector hinted that increased C-suite turnover was coming. In 2024, more than half of the leaders surveyed planned to leave within two years. And since then, corporate CEO departures have been on the rise. But corporate sector trends don’t always show up in the mission-driven sector. We are seeing it now.
That means boards are dealing with CEO transitions a little earlier than expected, and senior leaders below the CEO are expected to take on more strategic responsibility.
While some of this executive turnover can be attributed to normal job market fluctuations and generational retirement cycles, the stories we hear from senior leaders point to something different. Why are nonprofit executives leaving earlier than expected? The job of leadership itself is changing, and so are the conditions under which leaders are expected to perform.
The Nonprofit Leadership Job Itself Has Changed
Boards feel urgency to respond to a rapidly shifting environment, and that urgency lands on the CEO and, by extension, the whole leadership team. What organizations need from their leaders now is different from what they needed even a few years ago. The work is considerably harder and more complex.
The external pressures behind this shift aren’t things a single new strategy or initiative can resolve. New AI capabilities and the risk that comes with them. Federal and state government policy changes happening faster than many organizations are built to handle. Industry workforce challenges creating gaps that seem to keep getting wider. Economic uncertainty affecting travel, events, fundraising, membership, and other revenue streams organizations have relied on for years.
Across nonprofit and association executive roles today, leaders are expected to respond to changes happening well outside the organization’s control. As those changes put relevance and financial sustainability at risk, most C-suite positions are now responsible for some aspect of revenue diversification and developing new business models. That’s a different mandate from what the sector has asked of its leaders for decades.
As everyone works to exert some control in this environment of persistent uncertainty, exhaustion and burnout set in. It is understandable that some executives who have the option to leave are taking it. Their success was built in a very different environment.
This Is Also a Moment of Organizational Growth
The same pressures driving executive departures are also spurring investment and growth. Organizations are redrawing their org charts or creating new positions to diversify revenue and find new ways to bring value to their members and stakeholders. It is exciting to see so many using the tumult of this moment as an opportunity to leap forward.
The increase in executive transitions isn’t necessarily a problem to solve. It is an outcome of the current environment. But it’s important to recognize what’s happening and take steps to ensure your organization is prepared to manage it. What that looks like will be different for everyone, but here are a few suggestions to get you started.
Assess and Build the Leadership Capacity of Your Senior Team
If the CEO or another key leader departs, your organization will be far better positioned if strategic capability is already distributed among the team rather than concentrated in one or two people. And even if your team is stable, the skills once required mainly of a CEO are increasingly important for all senior staff.
Across functions, from HR and finance to membership and events, organizations need highly strategic thinkers who are comfortable making decisions without complete information and moving forward when there is no obvious answer.
That does not mean every senior leader needs to be able to step into the CEO role tomorrow. But everyone on the team should be able to work through strategic questions, develop solutions, present those ideas to committees or the full board, and guide implementation. If you don’t trust a member of your senior leadership team to present to or speak with the board, look closely at whether that person can develop those skills and, if so, create a plan to do so.
As organizations dive deeper into revenue strategy and business model innovation, we are seeing responsibility for that work spread from the C-suite to director-level roles. Everyone in a people-management position should assess their teams, identify how roles have changed, and plan for where the organization is going. Building a resilient leadership pipeline is your best protection against uncertainty.
Treat Your Next Hire as a Strategic Opportunity
If you have an open position on your senior leadership team, push against the tendency to hire someone who did what the last person did, only better. Think about what your organization needs now and what it will need over the next few years. What type of strategic thinking skills are missing in your leadership team? Do you need someone skilled in relationship-building and partnership development? Pricing strategy and market analysis? Building and testing pilot programs?
Hiring for new strategic capabilities takes careful consideration of how you’ll define and measure success and how you’ll identify candidates with the right skills. If your team hasn’t done this kind of work before, who defines what you’re looking for? Who recognizes these skills in a candidate when they don’t yet exist inside your organization?
Without the benefit of outside perspectives, organizations hire through the lens of what they already know. That means hiring teams operate with the same assumptions about what success looks like, tap into the same networks, and use the same interview approaches with candidates. It’s a closed ecosystem that, even if unintentionally, favors those who fit an established picture. Sometimes that works. But a closed ecosystem can make it difficult to hire candidates whose very job will be to do something different. We recommend talking with someone who isn’t working from the same set of assumptions you are. That could be a peer leader who has worked through similar issues, a board member from another sector, or a consultant who serves many organizations.
Sometimes the greatest value comes from someone asking a question your team hasn’t considered internally, asking why things are done the way they are, or pointing out that other organizations are solving the same problem differently. You don’t know what you don’t know.
No Single Leader Can Do It All
When the environment gets this hard, and the financial future of your organization hangs in the balance, it’s natural to look for an exceptional leader who can come in and “fix” it. But no single person can do that alone. No one can control the pace of change and the economic pressures that come with it. What you can control is how the most essential skills are distributed across your organization. You can control how ready you are for an unexpected CEO or executive departure. And you can control how you approach your next hire, treating it as an opportunity to build a team for what’s next.