When a nonprofit executive I interviewed told her board she was leaving, they were not happy. Some staff cried. She cared about the organization, too, and understood why the news was hard to hear.
But something else happened. People started asking about the job.
A few years earlier, the position had been a difficult sell. The organization was struggling, and people knew it. An interim leader who had previously decided she didn’t want the permanent role was now interested. When the board asked whether she was ready to take over, she said yes. And others were calling to ask about the open position.
“It feels good to know that it’s gotten to a place where people don’t feel like it’s so scary,” the executive told me. This is a great story. In just a few years, a leader had turned the leadership role itself around.
We tend to judge leaders by what they accomplish while they are in the job. What if we also judged them by whether anyone would want that job when they leave?
When the Job Becomes the Problem
Many leadership positions sound great on paper. But in practice, the expectations may be impossible. Every issue rises to the top, the board expects immediate answers, and the leader is responsible for results without enough authority or support.
Eventually, people begin to believe the job requires a special kind of person. Someone who can work all the time, absorb every problem, and somehow remain cheerful about it.
Well… maybe the job is the problem.
Bakker and colleagues (2005) studied over 1,000 employees and found that job resources given to the leader in the role, like autonomy, feedback, and social support, weaken the relationship between demanding work and certain aspects of burnout. The point for leaders is practical: When demands are high, personal determination is not a substitute for a job that gives people what they need to do it.
I interviewed the executive’s spouse as part of my research study. He had watched her work through much of this. He described her ability to look at a struggling organization and “create calm out of chaos.” He also saw the stress, the difficult personnel decisions, and the ways those “pressures sometimes follow her home.”
Pay attention to that. The lesson? An organization can improve while the person improving it pays a steep price. But sustainable leadership has to account for both.
Make the Emergency Ordinary
The executive told me two stories about routine food deliveries that failed to arrive.
The first… early in her tenure, the missed delivery meant people had to scramble to a grocery store to buy enough bread to keep serving meals. Everyone dropped what they were doing. It was a crisis.
The second… later, when a delivery problem occurred, the organization had backup food ready. Someone made a phone call, adjusted the plan, and everyone kept moving. Crisis averted.
Same problem. Very different day.
What changed is one of the least glamorous, but most valuable, parts of leadership: finding what repeatedly creates emergencies and making sure they no longer require an emergency response.
Imagine how different that job feels to the next person. There will still be surprises, but fewer problems will require only the executive to solve them.
Give People Room to Lead
People avoid leadership jobs for many reasons, but a big one is that they see every decision having to travel through one exhausted person. The role looks lonely because it is.
A meta-analysis of 105 samples by Lee and colleagues (2018) found that “empowering leadership” was positively associated with employee performance, helping behaviors, and creativity. Basically, giving people meaningful authority in their job can reduce an organization’s dependence on one person’s judgment.
Leadership Essential Reads
In my interview, the important moment was the past interim leader saying she was now willing to fill the role. We cannot know everything that informed her decision, but her answer suggests how the position was perceived. It had become a positive thing rather than a warning.
Succession Is Part of the Job
Most leaders say succession planning matters, but few actually make time for it. Froelich and colleagues (2011) found a gap between nonprofits’ high concern about executive succession and their actual low preparation for it.
And succession cannot rest entirely on the executive’s shoulders. Everyone needs to get involved. In a study of 1,020 nonprofit respondents in Germany, Geib and Boenigk (2022) found that shared accountability for succession planning between the board, the executive, and human resources was associated with a stronger sense of leadership continuity.
That means not just paying attention to the leader, but paying attention to the position itself. Are expectations realistic? Does the leader have authority to match responsibility? Are other people learning to make decisions? Could someone step in without spending the first six months putting out fires?
For the leader, it means taking pride in something hard to see: fewer emergencies, capable colleagues, and work that continues when you are not there.
Would You Take Your Own Job?
Before that executive left, she told me that everyone seemed confident that “nothing was falling through the cracks.” I suspect that reassurance meant a lot to people who worried about what would happen next.
So ask yourself this: If you had to apply for your own job today, knowing what you know about the hours, expectations, support, and pressure, would you take it?
If the answer is no, that’s useful information. You probably have some work to do on the job itself, not just on your ability to handle it.
To lead sustainably, build a leadership role someone else wants to step into.
