So, You're Thinking Of Stepping Down: Succession Planning For Newsroom Leaders (And Their Teams)

6:00PM Aug 25, 2023

Speakers:

Keywords:

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people

transition

leader

team

cassie

leadership

board

funder

folks

process

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work

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leave

jean

relationships

questions

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Yeah I think we probably want to use our IT functions remaining your name I'm sorry, you just said it Chris. Okay.

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are you here till Sunday

I need to see my family. My mother's son started school on Thursday. So you guys started already?

Well, high school started my daughter's isn't certain it's fun to happen.

Is it because one is in public and one's in private? Oh, they're

both in public charter schools but they can kind of set their own schedule. But the middle school starts a couple of days earlier because they ended a couple of days earlier.

So she's got some questionable things in place to finally be on the same schedule. Felt like we have different spring breaks.

Yeah. So last year.

For his spring break, he just like hung out. Like I can experiment with him because he loved me. And then we all went somewhere. So we took him out of school. And then this year we're doing the opposite. So we'll see. But yeah, this is my giant sixth grader. My husband actually is but like,

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he's almost as tall. He's very hello

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But okay, fashion designers fix it right like that's what you do. Yes, well route for the correct I mean a line skirts are always better anyway so.

What's your concern until after Labor really? Well, there's not there's no air conditioning in the public schools. And so you can't like they've tried starting I mean, there's a handful of schools, maybe they've had them but for the past couple of weeks always used to start after Labor Day and the past couple years. They tried bringing kids back at the end of August the last week in August. And they had to cancel school because of heat emergencies. And so yeah, there's you can't bring kids back into that building. Wow. That's awesome. We get emergency days. out early or school is canceled. What happens yeah, it's wild.

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Thanks, Kristen.

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Hey, folks. Okay. You sir. Hello. Can you guys hear me? Okay, now I can hear okay. Welcome. Hi, folks. It's a nice to see you

okay, we're not we're not going to use this one here. You do this one. I believe this one but it was exactly. Okay. I don't want anything is that me? Okay. Starting again. Hi folks. So wonderful to see you. And we know it's chilly in here. So hopefully we will use our body warmth here to warm up and have such scintillating conversation that things will warm up in the room. We wanted to welcome you here for this conversation about succession planning and leadership transition. We're excited to have this conversation we're gonna have a table talk also for if you want to keep the conversation going. Before we get into the agenda, I just want to say that this conversation is not being recorded. We wanted to give people a space to be able to speak freely, and we are going to sort of use the Chatham House rules, which basically means that you can take what you learn from here, but don't attribute it to a particular person or organization. Obviously you can attribute to resolve because they're here and talking publicly about it. But if if folks in the room are talking about that kind of stuff. If you want to attribute it though, feel free to ask your neighbor or whoever if that's okay with them. So that's on you guys to figure out. But we do want you to learn and share what you learn. So that's great. So we're gonna go through these these five things. We're going to talk about who we are a little bit about some of the background information and definitions of what we're talking about. A little bit of the planning timeline. Welcome. Come on in the timeline, that a lot of this, this kind of work goes by. It's one of the top questions that people get around leadership transition. We're going to talk about being human and what that means through this process. We'll talk a little bit more about operational resilience and what that means for your organization's in general, not just about leadership transition, because this is more than just about transition. And then we'll talk about some key questions and we want to get some conversation going here as well. So I'm Amy, Amy Kovac, Ashley, I am the head of national programs at the Lenfest Institute for journalism, which is based here in Philadelphia, but I also I always like to tell people I live in Washington DC, which is my my favorite city and we part of the reason I can live in DC is because I oversee our national programs, so they're sort of like a Philadelphia sized hole in my kind of portfolio. But the reason that I'm here is because I spent almost a year doing research and talking to a lot of different people about succession planning and leadership transition for an RJ I Fellowship, and big plug for RtI. If anybody wants to do a fellowship, please look into the RTI fellowships. They're great. You can work on a project and get support. So that's for folks who are looking for a fellowship, that's a great opportunity. So I'm really excited to talk about the research that I did. I put a whole guide together, which we'll talk more about, which is open to anyone to us. And it's something that I care a lot about because I care a lot about how leadership shows up. And I think how leadership shows up during transition is really, really important for the sustainability of organizations and that's what this is all about. So I'm super glad to be with you all. I'm glad to be with these ladies who have had their own specific experiences with this as well. So I will pass it along to my friends. I'm Cassie Haynes. I'm

a co founder of resolve Philly former co Executive Director currently still on grace period, and not not not working for anybody right now. For yourself. I Jean and I recently went through a leadership transition in our organization. We're excited to talk with y'all more about that today. And also are excited for conversations beyond this session. The three of us are hosting a tabletop conversation at four o'clock today. So any of the things that come up in this room, any of the things that come up if you want to expand on them, if you want to ask us more questions, there'll be a whole hour to talk amongst yourselves to chat with us. So join us at four if there are people that didn't get to come to this session and you feel like they might benefit from some of this conversation. Definitely. Let them know.

And I am Gene Friedman, rudovsky, the other co founder of resolve Philly, and now the sole executive director of the organization. And yeah, just excited to be able to share a little bit about our experience and the lessons learned from the things that we did well and the things that we could have done better with. Cool,

um, so I just got back from a trip to Scotland, which for some folks who are Harry Potter fans might know there's a lot of filming of movies in Scotland and I have two kids so we went to a lot of places that were Harry Potter themed and so when we were talking about the planning for the session, I brought up the you know, he has like should not be named or it in this case that shall not be named, because that came up a lot in the conversations I had with all kinds of people whether they were in journalism or outside of journalism, that it's really hard to talk about succession planning, people are afraid to do it, especially leaders who may be considering leaving, because they don't know how everyone else is going to react around them. And one of the big fears that I heard was, if I start to talk about it is my board or whoever the governing body is that I work with, are they going to immediately think I'm going now and I'm going to kind of get kicked out right. And so one of the things we want to do here is normalize the conversation around succession planning and leadership transition in general, especially at the top but also across organizations. And really to take it out of being the thing you don't want to talk about. And so we want to this is part of a healthy conversation, right, like transition to change. It's a lot of what we talk about anyway, we should talk about leadership transition and change as well.

I'll just give another brief example of how this is kind of considered considered a Voldemort esque phenomenon we recently some of you here may have applied for McKenzie Scott's open call for yield. You may have noticed that there was a set of questions. There were three questions. That said this won't necessarily immediately disqualify you but you will probably have to explain this more later. And the three checkboxes Where has your organization ever been the defendant in a civil or criminal lawsuit? Have you ever had in the past three years right in the past three years, defending the civil criminal lawsuit? Have you ever had a sort of targeted negative social media campaign against your organization? Or have you undergone a leadership transition? Those three things paired together in the last three years have you had interim leadership or undergone an executive leadership transition? And so this is real, right? There's like feelings around it. And also, it is real that I think a lot of folks in this space don't understand that leadership transitions are very healthy. And so that's the other point of this conversation is normalizing and also saying no, this is it's not just like it's not just okay, it's a good thing that there is shifting leadership.

Where I would love to have an understanding from y'all today as to who's in the room, and just where people are in the in the space of these kinds of conversations. And so are there are there are founders of of organizations in the room? Cool. Other executive leaders. What about people who have been hired with the intention of succession? Board members, anyone sitting on on a board that is responsible for hiring and supporting executive leadership? Hey allies. And who, what about somebody people who are on a team and you know, are wanting more of an understanding of organizational planning around leadership transitions. Okay, this is super helpful and it also looks like there's some representation from across the board. So we're going to, we're going to define some phrases in just a second but before we talk about some of the things that we are covering in today's session, we just want to note a few of the things that we're not talking about today that are very much a part of the conversation around succession planning and leadership transition, but we're not we're not delving into today. We're not covering your search. We're not talking about the search for hiring executive leadership. We're not talking about how to choose a new leader or how to manage filling capacity in the wake of a leadership transition. And we're not talking about onboarding new leadership. Alright, so those are three things that are very huge parts of this conversation, but we are expressly not delving into those elements today.

Okay, um, some terminology that we're going to use over the next hour or so. First is transition period. And so for transition period, what we're talking about here is essentially starting with you know, the moment or the day when a leader either, you know, says says to someone else in, you know, in their workspace, not just in their own mind, you know what, I'm, I think I'm getting ready to leave and we need to kind of start talking about this process. Maybe they say it to a board member, maybe they say it to someone else within the organization on staff, but that is the beginning of the transition period. And for these purposes, we're going to talk about the end of the transition period on that person's last day. Again, there are still transition things that happen after an Executive leader leaves but we're defining transition period in that way. Emergency secession, meaning something has happened and a leader is leaving because of an emergency, right? Not because it is time for them to move on. They're moving to a new city, whatever it is an emergency happens. And so secession needs to be kind of put into place. Departure define succession, which is what Cassie and I went through, right, it was okay. Cassie is ready to leave we can talk about kind of the details of why that happened. But thinking you know, very much in advance and and, and planning the departure around a combination of what was right for her and what was right for the organization and balancing those two things. And then a pop, which is purpose, statement, outcome and process and we'll kind of talk about how to apply those in succession planning, but that's a that's a helpful tool for any kind of project or thing that you are taking on particularly around. Alright, we're gonna go into timelines because as Amy said, this is like one of the first questions that come up with like, how long does it take to do this the right way? And of course, the answer is there is no there is no one answer. But we're gonna talk about some basic rules to follow and things to consider when you are wanting to plan in a departure to find secession, your timeline. Alright, so, first one, is there a hard deadline or date by which the leader must transition, right? Have they decided to take a new job and it starts in three months? Are they moving to a new city? Is there something you know, very tangible, that is dictating this timeline that needs to be taken? into consideration?

Second question is, how will the capacity leadership gap be accounted for? I know I just said that we're not talking about that today. But it's important that this question comes up really early in your thought process, right? This was something that Jean and I considered very early on. We made the decision with the support of our board that we were not going to hire another co executive director. And so that was a decision that really helped to shape what our timeline ended ended up being and what made the most sense for the organization. That's not to say that you know, there wasn't capacity that needed to be replaced, right, but we had, you know, a different hiring plan a different structure to account for that capacity. considering whether it'll be filled by existing staff, you know, understanding doing a doing some asset mapping of your own team. And understanding, you know, kind of the skills and experiences that exist. And, you know, contemplating that, even if it's not something that you're making decisions on but recognizing that an early attention to thinking about that capacity replacement is going to be clash. And then, you know, for the for the departing leader, or, you know, the the leader left behind but I gotta be honest, that that's like the first thing but, you know, what is what is the vision for the departure? You know, and that was a question for me as an individual. It was a question for Jean as an individual, and it was a question for the two of us as CO leaders, and so there might be a number of people or a number of groups of people who you know, serve as stakeholders in that, you know, vision for what a departure looks like. You know, asking yourself what needs to be true about the organization in order to achieve a good goodbye and Emile talk a little bit. More about this idea of a good goodbye. You know, for for us it was a strong, stronger investment in board development. There were some, you know, revenue and fundraising goals. And there were some some hiring goals that we that we had to you know, we I felt so strongly needed to exist Jean felt so strongly needed to exist before, before we want it to plan that departure. So, you know, what is that ideal vision for the departure?

One note, I think that it's important to make is that on this score is that they had each other in this sort of experience. Some of you in the room who are founders or individual leaders. You may not have a co executive director with you. But there are other people on your leadership team, presumably, who will be walking this this journey with you. And so I think it's really thinking about who are your stakeholders internally, but also hear your story circle, sort of externally with your board and others, that that can, you know, help you to find that as well. So, you know, in the research that I've done and other experiences, you know, I'm sure everyone in this room has been in an organization where transition has happened, and sometimes it feels like the apocalypse. Perhaps maybe not as bad but sometimes it can feel that bad. So even if you're you're not the executive leader, but you're part of a team it can, you know, there's lots of different things that can kind of come out. And so I think one of the things that that I've learned in talking to so many people about this and doing some consulting around it, too, is you actually have to make the space to plan for these things. I know that everyone in this room is doing 100 million things at 100 miles an hour and looking at you, Candace. But it's so important for your organization and the health of your organization, especially when you're a founder, I think there's a lot of anxiety around change. Because organizations often are identified through their founder. People will be like, it's this person's, you know, I've heard it being called like this person's project or this person's company or whatever, when in fact, it's an organization, right? And so really thinking of these things as organisms that need to and you really want them to survive past a leader leaving. That's what successes right like success is organizations that last and that are going to continue to serve their communities like that's what this is all about. Really. This is just one way of getting there and a really important way of getting getting there. The second part is you know, emergency succession happens. Emergencies happen. We have learned that in so many ways in the last several years. And we need to be prepared for them. We can actually do emergency succession preparation and planning. That's actually where I try to get people to start. Because, you know, everybody needs to know like, how do you log into stuff, right? Like how do you get into Canva? Or how do you whatever the things are you use, you know, that knowledge needs to be spread more beyond one person, whatever it is and needs to have access. So you can do planning for for emergencies. It's not an ideal way to turn over an organization, obviously, but you can still have as we talked about, a good goodbye, which is actually the language from a person I spoke to in religious spaces, about how they think about clergy who leave one congregation and go to another. They actually have really specifically defined timelines. In some denominations. They don't want people staying, they don't want someone telling that they're going to leave and then they leave like six months later, they actually want that to be pretty quick, because they're really thinking about the congregation that gets left behind or in the case of, of you all, like the staff that gets left behind. And so it's what does it take to have a good Goodbye? What are the things you need to get done to leave your organization in a good place, but you're not starting anything new. You're not committing to something new. And you're actually able to spend time we'll get to the human part of this in a minute but you're actually able to spend time with people to have those moments with individuals with teams as you need to, in order to help that transition sort of pass as as positively as it can, right. Sometimes it's going to be not positive, but we want to try to make this as much of a healthy experience is possible.

And the last is using a pop this was actually a really helpful concept that we got from the consultant that we worked with in our secession planning. So again, its purpose, purpose, statement, outcomes and process so I will give you an example. The purpose statement that Cassie and I wrote for our secession planning, was our purpose in undertaking secession planning is to move through this transition with grace, love, respect, and intention in a way that centers the success and stain of sustainability of the organization while also prioritizing our individual abilities to thrive. Okay, so that was the statement that we wrote. We presented it to our board. Underneath that we had a list of outcomes, what is the smoothest a session looked like to us? They were things like, didn't you know funder still had confidence in the organization staff felt well supported. Executive Leadership feels well supported, you know, programs continue running there isn't a gap in institutional knowledge right all those little things like oh, shoot, Cassie hit the you know, lock in for this all all the tiny things, and then set up the process where I mean, our process was working with an external consultant. We Cassie and I had, you know, specific meeting times each week or bi weekly, where we were addressing secession planning things we had, there was a whole process there, which maybe we'll get into more in the tabletops part, but the point was, it was all written down. We handed this to our board. We kept our staff updated about sort of where we were in the process. And so prioritizing that was incredibly helpful for us.

Humans be human is what I wrote. I just counted and no less than seven people in this room have seen me break down in tears in the last six months. So humans being human being friends are so many feelings that come along with change, that are a part of transitions that are a part of, of succession planning, and then the execution of that succession plan. There is grief there is there's so much grief a part of the process and you know, a fraction of it has been because Jean and I are close friends and you know there's the personal grief of not working side by side with your bestie every day you know that that is that is grief. There's also you know, this this thing is a founder I think I think other people can can probably identify with like burning a thing, and then saying, Okay, you got it. You can do this, like I don't need to be a part of this in order for it to thrive. And that's that's beautiful and that's that's also reflected here. There's joy in change in transitions. There's joy in the opportunity, that new leadership, that new perspective, that new experiences and skills offer. This is all true. There's confusion. You know, there's fear, there's anger, there's relief and the presence of any of these feelings does not make it a good or a bad or a successful or an unsuccessful process. Every single one of these feelings and then some have been present in in our transition process. And so making space for for all of those feelings for yourself, giving yourself as the leader who is transitioning, permission to feel modeling for your team, how to talk about that how to be real with that, like I cried in staff meetings, you know, like, this is hard. This is hard shit. Like, I love every single person on the team. It's very difficult to say those goodbyes. So I think you know, we're going to talk a little bit more about some of the best practices in our experience in from Amy's research and her connection with other leaders about how to really make space how to how to encourage those feelings. In fact, I think it makes the process that much more authentic. And I think the result let me tell you the joy that I feel being here at OMA and seeing what all of my team I haven't seen them for two months. I haven't been in staff meetings for two months. I don't know what they've been working on for the last two months. And it is joyful to hear them to hear things about this organization that I don't know. You know, like it's an incredible feeling. It's an incredible feeling. So there's there's so much joy in the process, as well. And I think embracing that and making for opportunities for that as important.

So one other part of the feelings is that it's not just the leaders who are leaving who are having these feelings. It's all the folks who are still in the organization. And again, I have lots of different conversations with folks, whether in the nonprofit space or other mission driven fields, and I think one of the things that also happens is that all of these feelings that you see here and more are happening simultaneously. So some people could be very happy about a transition at the same time. Other people could be very upset, and they may not understand each other and that may cause more confusion or more more strife potentially during that transition period for the staff when these things are going on. And so I think it's really important that that some things might happen that you don't understand, like someone may have a reaction to what's going on that may seem you know, outsized or it may seem like it doesn't track with where we are at this point. But it's because there's all these conflicting emotions going on at the same time and and and certain folks may not understand why others are seeing things in a different way.

Some tips for navigating the fields one of the things I've just said is modeling that openness, as a leader as a leadership team, as a colleague, as a friend. modeling that is something that Jean and I had, you know, it wasn't new or specific to succession planning and also I think it made for a place that other people could express more openly their concerns their their feelings about the transition their questions. Hey, you know what, you guys actually haven't been talking much about this part of it and we have some confusion. Can you clarify Can you talk to us more about what this part is going to look like?

So with orchestrating the final goodbye, there's Oh, okay.

Be as generous with information as possible and as appropriate. So, I think, Cassie, that just touched on I think one of our learnings there was, I think we there were times when we could have been more communicative with the staff. When we were dealing with Kathy's transition, and also, I got a great question. The other day when I was speaking about this to another group of like, how much how much transparency should you give to your staff? And I think, as a leader, your primary function is to keep your staff feeling safe and supportive, right? Cassie told me last July, that she was that they had made the decision to move back to Michigan. If we hadn't come to the team the next Tuesday at staff meeting to be like, Okay, guys, Cassie is moving back to Michigan. That would not have been a smart decision. As a leader. We didn't have a plan yet. We didn't know what it would mean. There would be more questions and answers. And so we took our time and, you know, talked for about a month or so between ourselves to really figure out then we told our board immediately after we told our staff right so there's, there's steps that you take and I think yes, transparency is important. And also you have to do some for thinking before you just kind of say all of the things and then when you're going through your process, you know, sharing that purpose statement with your team is a great thing and your team being staff and board and giving information so that they feel like they're being or that they are kind of kept along with the process.

One of the mistakes that we made was feeling like we couldn't share until we had all of the answers. Right. And sometimes, you know, this happens in in among leaders in lots of different contexts. You know, like you, you want to make sure that you have all of the answers so that your team has every ounce of information that they could possibly have. So that was you know, the the intention that Jean and I had, you know, and we got feedback from our team, like what's happening. And, you know, it was we wanted to have all of the information to present. And so, you know, being mindful of being as explicit as possible when you have some of the information being open about that they didn't need to have all of the answers you know, they they trust us. And so the information you know, that we give them you know, we could have, I think, been a little bit more, less guarded about what we were sharing at what point Yeah.

So that I think there's, we've talked about this a little bit, but there's a lot of stakeholders with this kind of work. So there's staff, there can be a board there's your community, too, right? What do you tell community members whose you've seen you as founders, you might be the people calling it your project, or you or whatever it is, right? So the orchestration of how you roll out that information is something that I think has got to be part of the thought process. If you are a nonprofit organization, really working on that with your board is incredibly important. And and thinking about when do you decide to publicly talk about this? I know Cassie wrote something that went out into the world but there was a lot that went into that before she did that. And there were lots of people who knew different parts of that information before the public knew. funders are also an important part of this. Gene sort of alluded to that earlier. When do you tell them how do you tell them with confidence that the organization you are setting the organization up for success after the departure? That's a really important part of all of these things. And I think, you know, thinking of like a stakeholder we'll have How do you orchestrate who you need to talk to and when you need to talk to them, and that you probably are going to need to go back and do you know that feedback loop with them multiple times depending on the information that you've got to share and are ready to share at various times.

being explicit about the role that the outgoing leader is playing is huge in navigating feelings, the feelings of you know, members of the team, the feelings of the leader. Aubrey, I'm looking at you because I feel like there's got to be a phrase better than lame duck. You can tell me what that is, and I'll swap it. But you know, there's there is this period of time, right, where it's like, well, you know, I want to finish out what what I am supposed to be doing. And also, you know, there was a very clear point in time where it was like, my, my contributions my opinion my thoughts actually aren't the ones that need to be guiding this conversation or even in this conversation. And so, figuring out it's going to be different for every single leader for every single team for every single organization. But figuring out you know what, what that is looking like it might unfold in real time. But making explicit some of that implicit those implicit actions is important. I stopped attending certain programmatic meetings, months before my last day, right? And I didn't just stop going to those meetings. I said to the people in those meetings, I am no longer going to be attending these meetings. And here's why. And this is me starting to pull back on some of those functions that I held. But but having that conversation making sure that everybody is on board, giving people a heads up, I'm going to stop attending these meetings in two weeks, or in two months or by this day, I will no longer be, you know, holding on to this function is a really, I mean, it's tactical and it's also a really good way for navigating the feelings. You know, from from all stakeholders.

I found I can add one quick thing there. I think it also shows your teams that you trust them. Yeah, right. You're trusting them to take things forward and you don't have to be involved in every single thing. And it hopefully gives them the confidence that you have in them, that they can keep things going even if you're not there. And I think that's a really important thing in times of uncertainty to really lean into trust and trust in relationships. So that people feel more confident moving forward.

All right. So we we kind of touched on this before that it is yes, there is secession planning that you can do during that transition period. And also the fundamental key to secession planning is making your organization resilient to any number of changes that come including leadership and management changes. And so we're going to talk a little bit about kind of how to build these things in from the ground up so that it's not just okay, we're in a we're in a transition period. We kind of like focus on this stuff, but what groundwork can you be laying now within your organization's whether you're in management or not, to be setting your organization up for success whenever that leader moves on. These are, you know, taken again, sort of from experience and things that Cassie and I have, along with our team built into results since 2018. And, and also tips from Amy and her research.

Redundancy can be a really good thing within an organization particularly in job functions and process ownership. Jean and I were co executive directors, there was some redundancy between the two of us but the kind of redundancy that really supported us throughout this transition was redundancy across leadership teams within our organization. You know, it's not just gene could do all the things that I could do so it's fine that I'm gone. Is it was you know, really intentionally having, you know, duplicative ownership over certain processes across the board in our organization? Not not separate from that is the documentation of those processes that enables redundancy without it being an inefficient like being a mess, right. So when you are documenting your processes and you're documenting the steps, you're tools, it makes building in redundancy. across teams that much more efficient. And, you know, to be perfectly honest, listen, there's a theme here, it's called process. Commit to using a project management tool. Just do it. It's it's really difficult. It's really difficult. To manage. I mean, any sort of transition, any sort of change, but particularly when you're talking about leadership at the highest levels, if your organization without some sort of shared, digital tool that everybody is on board with using we use Asana, I'm not plugging a specific tool, whatever works for your organization. But that's that's a really important part. Yeah.

So we all know that professional development is really important, right like all the time all the time, it's really important to the particularly, I think, sometimes leaders, middle managers, so as folks get kind of left behind with some of those things. Oftentimes, professional development is directed more toward more junior staff and want to you know, really retain our junior staff and keep them here and all that that's great. But when we think about succession and leadership transitions, we want to make sure that folks at the leadership level, are also getting that professional development and are also getting that support and it might look different at those levels than it does in other places. You can tell someone to take a course, right, or sign them up or whatever, for something. But at the sort of leadership level executive level, I think it's important to think about coaching to help folks kind of get to the next level. It's also helpful again, to think about like, I'm sure you all were thinking about, like, what are the things that we do that we can pass along to someone who's on our executive leadership team, and that's a professional development opportunity for them, but also is better for our organization overall, right so that there's more knowledgeable people in this place for once we decided to leave. So I think it has to be part of a continuous process and is really embedded in in leadership transition to prepare for it. And finally, it's, there's a lot of things may be revealed as you start doing succession planning. You will find the holes in the things in your organization that aren't working. And one of those holes could be that your board is not what it needs to be. You may have people on it who were the very first people on your board who were there with you, especially for founders, they're with you at the beginning to get things going. But they may not have the metabolism or interest in in helping you move forward into the next phase. And that's okay. It's really okay. And then there. Another thing that needs to be normalized is what do you do with boards that are not in the right place to help you move into that transition? Because one option with emergency transfer succession I will tell you is that someone on the board could become the interim leader and so if you don't have a board where somebody on the board could take that over potentially, you may be finding yourself a little flat footed. So I think there's a lot of work to think about the skill sets you need, the kinds of experiences that you need on the board to help you move into the next phase. So it's not a founders board. It's the board for the future of the organization.

All right, we've got just a couple more slides and then we want to take questions and we'll run through these quickly. Start thinking about leadership transition from day one, right like when Cassie and I came together to find resolve, we were very clear that we would not fall victim to the founder syndrome. We would leave at some point we would like set it early on the organization and folks would laugh and we're like no, but we're serious. Like we're leaving. We're not saying and so you know, just like normalize that from the very beginning. If you are a founder just be like no but it is in the best interest of organization and me personally to at some point move on and at some point is not in 20 years. It is you know, relative future.

Leaders also really need to practice and work on their own self awareness. It was one of the folks that I was talking to who did not want to be quoted saying that leaders need to be more self aware because she felt it was a controversial thing to say. I was like, Well, I don't have a problem saying it because I don't think it's controversial. I think it's really important that leaders have to become more self aware. That's just part of what it means to be a leader these days, quite frankly, to me, and really be conscious of what's happening around you and how you're reacting to those changes, right? Because a lot of times these transitions happen because of life changes right people want to be doing something different. They met whatever the goal was that they wanted to within an organization, but they need to be attuned and tuned in to what those things are for themselves because no one else can really do that for them. One of the worst things that can happen with succession planning is that your board tells you you have to leave. Nobody wants that to happen, right? You don't want that to be the way that you leave an organization. You want to be aware enough about your own situation, that you're figuring out when is the right time to go. And then it's really important to you that it's not your job to find a replacement. It's you know, again in nonprofits, it's the fiduciary responsibility of the board to do that. And when it comes to communication about how those searches are going and all of those things that should be coming from the board or representative of the board. It really is important to separate those things because for a lot of reasons. But you know, one of the folks that I spoke to who was a founder, said that everyone kept asking him like, oh, well, who's going to be the next person? He's like, I'm not I'm not involved in that process. That's not my job here. If you have questions about that, you need to go to these people and ask them and the hope is that those folks will be running a transparent process that staff and others will know what's going on. But it's not your job to do that. You really have to be focused on the good goodbye.

Figure out your own appropriate ways to continue to support the organization. And for a lot of founders, the inclination is to walk sit on the board. I'll be on the board. I am not resolved Phillies board. It would not be in my best interest to be unresolved Phillies board, and it would not be in the best interest of the organization for me to sit on. Its board. What is in the interest of the organization is me reposting everything that resolved fairly posts on LinkedIn. I mean, sharing all of the job opportunities like all of my networks, me continuing to show up and support and subscribe and you know, talk about the amazing work that is coming out of that organization. That was the right choice for me it was the right choice for the organization. It may not be the right choice for you or for your organization. But really consider what is in the best interest right rather than you know, I think if it is in the best interest for your organization, as a founder for you to be on the board. I think that'll be clear to the stakeholders, right? And if what is really happening is, you know, kind of a white knuckle death grip. I think that'll also probably be pretty clear to your stakeholders.

And finally, just don't stay too long. I mean, if you said at the beginning, you're not gonna see it that long. Don't stay that long. That says left. I will leave at some point. I don't know when but it's not going to be in 10 years. It's going to be sooner than that. Like just if you are in leadership place just like just don't stay too long. Think I think it's different for everyone. I you know, I would posit that, like a founder who's been someplace for 10 years really should be questioning why they're there. I mean, I don't want to put like, you know, hard.

I agree I agree that like I in

my mind that like you because why why are you still there? Have you not developed staff, you know, kind of capable enough to stay on Have you not? Is is the organization so attached to your own identity that you are worried that if you leave, the organization can thrive Are you staying just because you really love it and you want to keep doing it and but maybe someone else needs to come in like it's hard. But yeah,

it's important to think about your organization's in their development, right? There's different phases that organizations go through. And what you need is the leader who's going to help you with the phase that you're in? Yeah. So if so, so we're not saying like 10 years, you should get right. That's not what we're saying. It's just an example of, you know, in 10 years, you might be in two different phases. A person you know, a person who's a great founder may not be great at doing the next phase of what it takes to you know, take that organization beyond that phase. And it might not be a preference. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

If you might be a builder.

It's skills, its interest. Right? It's curiosity. It's all those things, which is why I get it, you know, I'm gonna go back to self awareness. You have to know why you're doing what you're doing in the organization that you're in. And you have to think about what the organization needs at that moment. Are you the right person in that moment?

So before we get into your guys's questions, these are questions that we get all of the time. How do I find the time? Yes, secession planning takes time. Think about the time that it's going to cost your team if you don't do this right. Period. Just you can carve out a couple hours every week to save your team from the you know, utter chaos that would be leaving behind an organization that doesn't have the right capacity that doesn't have processes documented. Just think about what happens if you don't do this well, and you will find the time

our measures of success for our transition process. The opposite of those measures of success, high staff turnover, losing funders, because of because of a change in leadership. This is this is like what's on the line. If it's something that's not prioritized, right? That's like the that's the risk. It's, you know, it's not like a wonky process and maybe like a couple of negative mad tweets. It's you know, it's significant,

and the communities that depend on you right and work with you are are also you know, there's a big risk for them too. If you can't figure out the time to do this. I mean, one thing I tell people because it does, it can look overwhelming, like don't don't mistake that this is easy work to do. It needs to get done. It can be difficult at times. It can take a lot of time, but like don't You don't have to eat the whole enchilada in one bite, right? You just eat one bite at a time. Do I need outside help? So yes and no. It really depends on what you need. Right? So we all are love this kind of work. We all do consulting on it and help people with it. It really depends though, on what you need. We talked earlier about the fact that that that that Jean and Cassie had each other but they use an outside consultant to help them. For single founders or single leaders. You may need someone to bounce ideas off of. But you may not need someone from start to finish. You might need someone for one part of it and then you can do it on your own. It's a little bit like strategic planning. Some people know how to do strategic planning because they've got those skills are ready and they can do it internally and great gangbusters. But other folks don't have those skills inside and so they do need an outside organization to help them and it really just depends again on the self awareness of like what do you need in order to get to be able to get this work done? And then finally, how can you talk to support or talk to a leader of my organization about this? This is tricky. A lot of this is based on trust and relationships. I think as leaders we should model this behavior of talking about this, this kind of thing. And it's worthwhile to ask people questions you don't say like and when are you leaving? That may not be the right way to approach this. But I think especially if you're in an executive layer that sort of right below a leader and you're wondering because you're wondering what that what that means for how you're gonna have to step up potentially or whatever. Being able to have regular conversations and regular check ins one of the things that I suggest to folks from the leader side of it is that they give themselves their own kind of professional self like self assessment every year. There's an example of that in the guide that we'll share in a minute of questions to ask yourself like to just check in. And I think it's worthwhile for leadership teams to ask those questions of of themselves as a team to know where they sit. What things need to be done for the organization overall, but also where we're focused on, you know, their own personal journey and how that intersects with what the organization needs.

On that note, folks, we'd love to take any questions that you have, and again, there'll be you know, we'll be back in here and a half an hour for some more chitchat. So if you have, you know, a question that you don't feel like asking in front of the group, that's totally fine. There is a microphone if you want it.

Otherwise, I can repeat back question so that everybody can hear. Go ahead. Oh, is it is it in the back?

No, it's right. It's yours one right here. Oh, there's one back there. Okay.

Okay, is this a great Hey, technology. So I'd love to hear you talk more about fear, which you touched on in the Navigating the fields section. Even with the maximum possible transparency there are obviously aspects of the transition, you can't share beyond key transition stakeholders. And in my experience, the farther team members are from the transition team organizationally, the more likely they are to worry that there's a big scary thing that prompted the transition that they are not being told about. Can you give me some insight on how you manage that particular problem, especially keeping in mind that a lot of times those questions and concerns are discussed outside of the view of stakeholders. And so you may not even know who or what they're concerned about?

Yeah, I think, you know, in our specific situation, resolve is a place where we tend to be more open with one another as colleagues in general. And so my dad passed away two years ago, my colleagues knew that my wife and I were planning to move my mom to Philadelphia with us that was, you know, part of our relationship. They knew these things about me and so when I came to my team, and I said, You know what, I went to visit my mom this summer in Michigan, and we just decided not to move her away from the place. She's lived for 50 years, and instead, we decided that our family was going to move there. That was something that the team, it was difficult, you know, like, that was a huge difficult decision for my family, and also the relationship, the vibe, the culture that exists. That result really enabled me to share all of that with my team at the right time, right at the appropriate time. And so there wasn't, you know, there wasn't a big scary thing that, you know, the team was concerned precipitated my departure. I was very open and very honest. And also, you know, honest with Jeanne and I having a discussion about the fact that well resolved. Phillies work has national implications. We support newsrooms across the country resolved deserves local leadership. And so it wasn't on the table. You know, that that I would be a co Executive Director living halfway across the country. And so I think that is very specific and unique to our situation. I do think that you know, a broad plug for more humanized workplaces, right, when we have places where people feel safe, coming and showing up as their full selves. You know, like that kind of information doesn't cross boundaries. It's not, you know, inappropriate in the workplace. My team you know, was was very much a part of that journey. And I think in large part because of, you know, an overall culture that enables people to you know, kind of have that, that level of, of safety and of comfort.

With their colleagues, maybe could speak to large organizations where that sort of intimacy isn't practical.

Yeah. So I think one place where that can show up, especially if people don't understand what's happening on the business side. There can be big concerns about where, you know, what's happening financially. And so, you know, another plug for for better cultures and better transparency around things, but I think sometimes what you have to do is tell people what you can't tell them in a way which is, I know, you're gonna have a lot of questions about A, B, C, and D. I can answer a and d. And the reason I can't answer B, and C is for the following reason. And or I can't talk about this now, but I can talk about it in some some future time. I'm gonna hold me accountable. You hold me accountable, right? I think there. There are ways to be transparent without saying certain things, especially if there's an HR situation going on, which I know there's I don't know if there's a session at OMA about that. But there should be one about HR situations and how you communicate during those things because it can be a shit show. And you get different advice from different people about what you can say and then it kind of feels like you're not saying anything. So I think it really depends on the specific experience that you're talking about. But I was always you know, I think whatever you can do to be clear about what you can say and clear about what you can't and if you can say Why say why. Thank you

thinking and I am a proud member of the Board of resolve and totally proud to be working with Cassie have worked with Cassie and working with z now. I wanted to underscore a little bit more the importance of communicating with the funders. And this was a personal experience, nothing to do with the result but I was exiting a number of it. And we had all we had it all planned out. It was a rather short timeline and we had discussed you know the board was on board the staff everything knew but we had forgotten to make a special show for our main funder. And so shortly a few days before I'm leaving, we get a call from this funder saying that he is reconsidering his support for the organization. And to this day, I am sure that he had nothing to do with his the way he framed it was with his concern that I was leaving in the stability. He was mad because we hadn't made a special show he was a human human being and we should have I should have known that and should have created a special occasion and you know made a special time for this funder to understand what there and that the person that was staying was as competent or even more competent than myself and taking the organization to different levels. So I just wanted to underscore let's not forget our human hub funders are human after all.

I can share I can share very quickly. And then we can do one last question about how we approached this. Essentially. Once we had told our board and staff and it still wasn't public, there was you know, sort of several months between telling our board and staff and when we made a public announcement. Cassie and I made every effort to if we were if we had an opportunity to see a key funder in person to have an in person conversation. If not, if there was a zoom coming up, we would tell them directly and if there was any funder that we hadn't had that opportunity to do it. We Cassie sent them a personal note. Prior to there being a public announcement, I think it was a week or so before and there weren't even that many that we had to ultimately tell via email because we were very strategic about just kind of taking that opportunity to because it is right all those of us in fundraising it is based on relationships and so you have to approach those relationships with as much care and intention as you do with your team and board.

Thanks. I'm curious how you to approach the decision not to have another co Ed and how to how you spread those that capacity within the team. Yes,

happy to speak to that. So a few different things. One is we we my when Casper said moving back to Michigan we realized she wasn't gonna stay in this role. My instinct was okay, we hire another co director. And it was actually Cassie. And then Chris had some conversations with folks on the board but they really challenged me to say, Jeanne, I understand that feels more comfortable at this moment is that in the best interest of the organization? Is that in the best interest of the person who would be stepping into that role, right? There's a power dynamic between one co founder who is a co Executive Director and someone else whether it was you know, internal or external, that person is not a co founder like how does that set? Do you? Are you setting that person up for success in that relationship? And so we kind of jointly decided that it made most sense that for now I would stay is solely D doesn't mean that for the rest of my time here I will be the only Executive Director it doesn't mean result we'll never have co executive directors again but for right now. It made sense for me and the team for me to stay in this role. Then we thought about you know, the the work that Cassie did and obviously filling that capacity. So Lee whack is over here. He is our senior development director. A lot of what Cassie and I spent our time doing was fundraising. So it was very clear we were going to hire someone full time in that position. And then there were parts of so a part over here is our chief programs officer. And then there's our CEO. Oh, and so there were parts of Cathy's work and even our shared work that we sort of, you know, redistributed to a new executive team amongst me and Aparna and backarc Oh, so again, you know, it's it is that was very much kind of case specific to us why we made those decisions, but it was thinking about it both from the perspective of what is the organization need, and that centering that what is going to be best for the organization moving forward.

Quick follow up on the announcing the news to funders, what's your approach to telling foundations who you know, usually we're going after big dollar amounts from and also individual donors who have been key to the organization. Do you tell at what point in the process do you tell them? It was?

I mean, we're Jean and I have pretty close real personal relationships with a number of our program officers or you know, whatever title they hold, and so you know, it wasn't uniform. We have a closer relationship with so and so at this foundation. And so you know, that person because we were having lunch knew a month before so and so with this other foundation, right? And so, you know, it's kind of staggered, really based on relationships with, you know, whoever the institutional representative was, if if it was like a little bit of a faceless, you know, we have a couple of those brands or it's just like, yes, then, you know, like, there's not like a person that we communicate back and forth with, they got a note from me. The day or two before it went public. Right. So it was kind of a range depending on the relationship that we had with that specific institutional partner with individual donors. You know, it was different. We also have very close personal relationships with with our major donors. It's been a program that Jean and I have worked to build over the last few years and, you know, had done so successfully, and it's really been based on our individual relationships. And so, you know, one of the I moved back to Michigan in November, and I was coming to Philadelphia pretty much every other week for six months. Part of that time was, you know, Lee, and I would go to a founders house and like, have tea in their backyard. And, you know, there were very warm introductions to some of the newer folks on our team, our communications director, we Aparna you know, there's so I think it really it really depends on the relationship. But again, you know, fundraising is heavy on the relationships, and I think doing sharing the information with your funding partners in a way that's consistent with the relationship that you've been stewarding is clutch, so the relationships that we would stewarded were very close personal relationships and so we told them in a in a close personal way,

one other way that I would maybe think about that from like a more global sense to gets back to the redundancy actually, of keeping in mind this is for the success of the organization. Right? So bringing people who maybe they didn't know, originally into those conversations earlier on so that they're not, you know, they're not going to be freaked out like Oh, who's this new person, right? And if you're only introducing a new person to them, when you're leaving, that's probably too late, right? Like trying to bring people along who are part of the leadership team or other parts of your organization, so that they they also are building those relationships so it doesn't feel like the organization is stuck at going back to square one with building those relationships. Because, you know, there's only one Cassie right, but she can help bring other people along in those conversations.

It's true outside of funding, too, right? As a founder, you know, so, so much of it's the danger of your identity being so wrapped up or the organization being so wrapped up in your identity those, you know, introducing new people, putting new people you know, I'm on the stage at conferences, you know, seeing my colleagues, host sessions and give keynotes and, you know, all of these things, it's a huge part of of succession planning, actually

making space for others in your organization, and also creating those, you

know, facilitating the building of those relationships, you know, public and also among your stakeholders. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's a QR code.

This is how it works. This is for Amy's amazing guide. But she did, you know, informed by a lot of research by folks, not just with folks, not just in the news industry, but from other folks like

give me a thumbs up if it's working. Yeah.

So this was created in a Google doc to be as accessible as humanly possible. A lot of the things that we talked about at the beginning that we weren't going to cover are not covered in the guide either, but are coming. There are pieces of this that I'm going to continue to add to. But I really wanted this to be a great jumping off point for folks to start thinking about this work and give some frameworks to start the work. And we all will be here in 20 minutes to continue with our conversation. So if anyone wants to stick around or go get a snack and come back, we're happy to have private conversations that that might be more comfortable for folks or just come hang out with us. We'd love to have you even though it's cold. Yeah, bring a friend it'll become warmer. Thank you.