July 2024 Community Gathering with Naomi Hattaway of Leaving Well
Our group was fortunate to meet once again in July 2024, this time we were graced with guest Naomi Hattaway. Naomi works with organizations and individuals who are ready to design and carry out happier and healthier workplace transitions. Her Leaving Well framework offers tools and practices to guide and support her clients in creating team and executive departures that are smooth and generative for the individual and the organization.
Considering how intertwined staff departures can be with organizational endings, the conversation was lively and illuminating. Here is some of what we discussed.
Systemic Support Wanted For Endings And Transitions
Naomi began her short presentation by sharing a bit of her back story as well as her current focus on appealing to boards, foundations, and the greater philanthropic space to think more about the institutions and tools needed to support inevitable transitions in the nonprofit space. According to the most recent Boardsource Leading With Intent study, only 29% of nonprofits surveyed had a written succession plan. Further, only 27% surveyed felt they were prepared to handle an unexpected executive departure, and many board members expressed trepidation about leading through such a transition. Naomi emphasized the importance of boards in managing transitions of key staff and how disastrously things can go when boards find them self disastrously unprepared to manage the situation. For that reason, she advocates that executive teams —- rather than boards — take the lead on scoping the succession plan.
rom her vantage point, there is still a lot of work to be done to raise awareness and increase preparedness for endings.
“What’s most urgent for me is a transition from trying to support the individual, to asking the system to be responsible for endings and transitions.””
From Boardsource’s “Leading With Intent 2021” report
Talking About Endings Doesn’t Cause Endings
Another topic the group delved into is the perpetual fear individuals and organizations have about even speaking about endings. One member mentioned they pitched to do some facilitation for a nonprofit, but the when that group saw that the person specialized in endings they ran away fearing their community would think they were closing. Rather than using the engagement to think through what the end could (eventually!) look like them, they missed the opportunity for fear of contagion.
In Naomi’s case, she’s often found that when she approaches a board, the directors often push the discussion away offering things like, “Okay, that doesn't apply to us. We have a great person in charge. They're not going anywhere. In fact, we just gave them a raise.”
This all shows how far we still have to go to simply destigmatize conversations about endings.
Transition Personas
In Naomi’s view, “change is what happens to us, while transition is how we navigate through it.” As part of the work of supporting these transitions, Naomi sometimes has people on the team take a personality test so she can identify what role they can/might play in tackling the changes underway. In this way, people can have awareness about their own triggers and also know who to reach out to or task with things that might be overwhelming for them in the process.
Understanding themselves and their roles, helps everyone on the transition team move forward with a shared language, greater mutual understanding, and more confidence. The transition can, thus, be a chance not to “get back to normal”, but move forward as a more fortified institution.
The Power of “What If?”
Executive — and especially founder — departures don’t just mean possible tumult, they can also mean the complete topple of an organization. In addition to the personal reasons that might be pulling a key leader away from the organization, the overwhelming sense of responsibility to the nonprofit, the staff, the community, and the mission may cause absolutely paralyzing guilt, freezing the reluctant leader in place. In the work Naomi does with such individuals, she encourages them to lean into the thought exercise of “What if?” She pushes them to walk through what the consequences of leaving would be, what and who would be affected, and then move forward with a possible plan for mitigation.
Facing the mere possibility of leaving often proves to require more courage than actually leaving, but when we are brave enough to think through contingencies and design a plan, we can often leave behind a legacy free from the bleakest aspects of our fearful “what if” thoughts.
“Most of what I do is listen and sit almost by the bedside of folks that are navigating transition and navigating what ends look like.”