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Leadership & coaching

Leadership succession planning for nonprofits

Signs you need a succession plan

If you're to get sick or leave suddenly, there is no one who could immediately step into your shoes.

What you'll achieve

We help you create a plan for leadership transitions, identifying key roles, potential successors, and development pathways.

How a Nonprofit Builder consultant helps

  • Identify the leadership roles most critical to continuity, assess internal readiness, and build a practical succession plan covering interim cover, development needs, and transition triggers.

Key deliverables

  • Succession risk assessment, critical role map, potential successor profile and development actions, interim cover plan, leadership succession framework.

From the resource library

Free tools and guides to get started

  • 4.3C050

    Building Leaderful Organizations

    Volume 6 of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Executive Transition Monograph Series, written for nonprofit executives and boards. It sets out 3 approaches to succession planning: strategic leader development, emergency succession planning and departure-defined succession planning. A section on the tough issues covers common sticking points, and a resource list closes the guide. Boards and executives use it as a framework to start succession planning and to spread leadership across staff.

    Start hereClassicKey manual or guideFree
  • 4.1C044

    Nonprofit Leadership Development Toolkit

    A free toolkit for nonprofits that want to grow leaders from within. It comes with the Bridgespan article How Nonprofit Leadership Development Sustains Organizations and Their Teams. It contains sample competencies from Bridgespan's competency bank, a 70-20-10 development plan template that a manager and staff member fill in together, and guidance on rolling the approach out across an organisation's systems and culture. It is a download from the article page.

    CurrentTool or templateFree