A few years ago, Neighborhood Funders Group did something most organizations avoid at all costs. They looked directly at the pattern of hard exits among their own leaders—especially their women of color executives—and asked why it kept happening.
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Not "what went wrong with this one person”, but to ask what was going wrong with THEIR organization. That distinction is everything.
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NFG recently published an Accountability in Action Toolkit built from that work, alongside a companion piece by Amy Morris and Kimberly Freeman Brown. It documents a powerful two-year process: interviewing former leaders, board members, and staff; researching leadership models across the philanthropic and movement sector; and eventually landing on a new co-president structure—built, and searched for, with radical transparency.

Here's the part that really resonates with me:

We talk a lot in our team and with our clients about succession planning as a logistics problem. Who's next, when do they start, what's the transition timeline.

NFG's work is a reminder that it's also an equity problem. The way an organization has always handled leadership change tells you exactly who it has and hasn't been protecting.

Their key finding, though, is the one I want every board chair and funder to sit with:

Structure matters less than culture.

A co-ED model, a sole executive, a distributed team—none of it fixes an organization on its own. What matters is whether there's a strong second tier, honest information sharing, real board engagement after the hire (not just during it), and a culture where power and decision-making are actually clear.

That's the whole argument behind Leaving Well. A transition plan is not a document you write once. It's the ongoing infrastructure—trust, transparency, financial cushioning, board readiness—that determines whether your next leader thrives or just survives long enough to leave hard, too.

NFG also did something I wish more organizations had the nerve to do: they were honest that this work cost real time, real money, and real emotional labor, and that it still isn't finished. No polish, no pretending it's solved. Just here's what we learned, here's what we're still working on, here's what we owe the leaders who came before.

Their new co-presidents, Amanda Andere and Stephanie Chan, say it best. Andere notes the board’s transparency "fundamentally shaped" their transition. Chan calls out the power of a search process built on honesty rather than performance.

That's what accountability in action actually looks like, not leaning vaguely on a hobbled together values statement. It all requires an equitable search process, an accountable board, budget lines that match your values, and a decision to tell the truth about your own history before you ask someone new to lead through it.

If you're a board chair, an ED, or a program officer reading this: what would it take for your organization to look this deeply and honestly at its own leadership history—before the next departure forces the question?

• ​Join us on LinkedIn to share your thoughts
• Listen to Naomi Hattaway’s conversation with Amanda Misiko Andere​

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Consider our team as your Leaving Well guide to navigating workplace transitions 🧡 We normalize workplace transitions one organization + person at a time.