This tool, shared from RoadMap and Strategies for Social Change’s Leadership Transition Toolkit, maps out five primary stages in the leadership transition planning process. This tool helps organizations anticipating leadership transitions have a sense of what to expect through each part of the process.

Fresh Lifelines for Youth’s (FLY) board made important choices to ensure its next CEO, Ali Knight, could hit the ground running as the nonprofit's new leader. Here Board Chair Mark Donnelly and Board Vice Chair June Wang share the board’s approach to the nonprofit's leadership transition.

Visit BMP's leadership transition hub on the web.

Transitions in the top leadership of nonprofit organizations can be times of crisis or opportunity. Intergenerational and racial dynamics inevitably impact leadership turnovers.

As more Baby Boomers consider leaving long-term jobs and even organizations they founded, other long-term leaders will look for new ways to contribute while making space for new leadership.

Their resources provide information on how to facilitate just and equitable leadership transitions to better serve your organization and mission.

While the field has been tracking the dearth of Black leadership at the top for quite some time now, we have not looked enough at how we do executive leadership transitions, which is overdetermined by what we call “best practice.”

The number one responsibility of any board—for-profit or nonprofit—is effective management of the senior executive, especially a new one. Yet, nonprofit leaders often report to Bridgespan that their boards fall short of that goal. Here are five ways nonprofit boards can more effectively onboard and support their new CEOs.

This is an archive of many webinars presented by Nonprofit Quarterly on this topic.

This quick overview of some basic transition considerations and list of handy resources comes from the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative, built on learnings from their work in supporting executive transitions.

Are you and the organization ready for transition? Use the list below to assess the transition readiness of both the organization and yourself, plan and prioritize next steps.

Nonprofit staff leaders, boards, consultants, and funders continue to struggle with the question of how to design and execute executive transition processes that:

1. reflect equity and justice values

2. engage staff and community beyond the board of directors

3. attract and support incoming BIPOC leaders

4. allow for emergent interpretations of how executive leadership looks and acts

Watch the recording of this conversation that interrogates executive transition "best practice." Which practices might we keep and reimagine? Which can we let go of? What should we add to the transition model to center the needs and realities of incoming BIPOC leadership especially?

Executive transitions vary in length based on the unique circumstances of each organization. However, almost every transition involves the same phases and key steps on behalf of the board and staff members.