Celebrating the 2026 Lunar New Year, which marks the Year of the Fire Horse

When an Executive Director announces they’re leaving, many boards of directors take what feels like the obvious next step: they begin looking for a replacement. That impulse makes sense, especially when timelines feel tight. Boards are action-oriented, and filling the seat can seem like the most responsible move.

In our work accompanying organizations through leadership searches, we’ve learned that moving straight to the search can sometimes mean skipping an important step.

Search and transition are often treated as one and the same. In practice, they’re related but distinct — and when they’re approached as interchangeable, organizations can encounter avoidable challenges that surface mid-search or even after a new leader begins.

The Difference Between Search and Transition

A search is the process of finding and selecting a new leader. A transition is broader: it’s the arc of organizational change that unfolds before, during, and after that search.

When transition work is intentional, it gives an incoming leader a real chance to succeed. When it’s rushed or incomplete, new leaders may inherit unresolved dynamics that are difficult to untangle later.

As Nikki Dinh of the Leadership Learning Community describes, successful leadership transitions involve not only recruiting a new leader but also offboarding the prior leader, supporting interim leadership, onboarding the incoming ED, and clarifying roles, authority, and communication between board and staff. This work is almost always more demanding than organizations initially expect.

We’ve found this to be true in our own engagements. By the time we’re brought in to support a search, the transition is usually already underway. Sometimes that means important organizational questions — such as why the ED is leaving, what they’re leaving behind, and what the organization actually needs next — are still unfolding. In some cases, it takes time for everyone, including us, to fully understand the dynamics at play.

The good news is that organizations can take steps now to prepare for future transitions, even if a departure isn’t imminent.

The Questions That Get Skipped

Before launching a search, there are several grounding questions boards can pause to consider:

Do we understand why our ED is leaving? The circumstances of a departure matter. Whether it’s burnout, conflict, vision misalignment, or a natural evolution, each carries different implications for what the organization may need next. Engaging in this reflection is a strategic use of time.

Do we have enough resources to do this well? A leadership transition requires real investment. That might include working with an organizational development partner before the search begins, getting advice from a trusted partner who has been through executive transitions, or deliberately surfacing internal labor or culture issues before candidates enter the picture.

What are the dynamics between staff and the board, and how do power differentials shape those relationships? This is often one of the hardest questions for boards to sit with honestly. We frequently hear a similar dynamic described: staff hold deep institutional knowledge and community relationships and want meaningful involvement. Boards, meanwhile, carry responsibility for strategy, financial stewardship, and long-term direction. Both perspectives can be valid. The tension between them rarely resolves on its own; it often needs to be surfaced and worked through deliberately.

A recent piece in Stanford Social Innovation Review, “The Civic Stakes of Organizational Disagreement,” argues that how organizations handle internal tension shapes their broader civic health. That insight feels especially relevant during leadership transitions.

What do community members and other stakeholders need to know? For community-based organizations, the people served are not passive observers of a leadership transition. They often have meaningful relationships with the departing Executive Director and with the organization itself. We’ve seen transitions become more complicated when key stakeholders felt left in the dark or learned news informally. Being thoughtful about who needs to know what — and when — reflects how an organization understands accountability and relationships.

What This Looks Like in Practice

For staff: your knowledge matters, and your concerns are legitimate, even when the process feels opaque. One of the most constructive contributions staff can make is to articulate observations about organizational health clearly and through appropriate channels, while distinguishing those from personal preferences about leadership style. Both are relevant; they are simply different conversations.

For board members: your role during a transition is not only to fill the seat, but to take stock. That includes understanding the organization’s finances, culture, and morale before drafting a job announcement. It may also mean strengthening governance fundamentals where needed. Many board members step into their roles without deep familiarity with legal responsibilities or with the boundaries between board oversight and staff management. BoardSource offers foundational governance resources, including guidance on managing executive transitions.

A Note on Timing

There’s a persistent assumption that transitions should move quickly and that installing someone in the role fast signals stability. In our experience, when organizations rush to hire before deeper organizational work is done, the period of instability often lasts longer than expected.

Incoming leaders can find themselves doing transition work that might have been addressed beforehand — sometimes without complete information or the benefit of a board that has had space for honest reflection. Investing time at the beginning often prevents structural strain later.

Resources Worth Knowing

  • Leadership Learning Community (leadershiplearning.org) — Resources on leadership transitions, particularly useful for organizations thinking about how leadership shifts connect to culture and power.
  • ProInspire’s Reimagining Leadership Transitions report (proinspire.org/reimagining-leadership-transitions-report) — Grounded in the experiences of executives of color, with concrete strategies for transitions that strengthen rather than destabilize organizations.
  • BoardSource (boardsource.org)— Governance resources for boards at every stage, including research on nonprofit board practices.
  • Leading Forward (leading-forward.org)— A curated library of transition and leadership resources with a racial equity lens.

One of Movement Talent’s roles is to help boards and search committees run fair, equitable searches focused on candidate experience and organizational fit. After six years of working alongside organizations at this moment, we’re still learning what makes the difference between a search that lands well and one that doesn’t. What we’ve seen so far is that the strength of a search is closely tied to the amount of intentional work done before it formally began.

Not every transition unfolds predictably, and even well-designed searches can surface unexpected dynamics. The earlier those dynamics are named, the stronger the foundation for what follows.

A final note: one scenario we haven’t explicitly addressed here is when a board decides it’s time for an ED’s tenure to end. That kind of transition carries its own dynamics — some overlapping with what we’ve described, and some quite different. We’ll take that up in a future post.