VIDEO | Leadership Transition: Is Your Organization Ready?

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Leadership transition is not a matter of if, but when.

How prepared is your organization?

In this video, C3’s Nanci Hibschman shares key data and insights on why succession planning is essential to sustaining mission continuity, along with practical steps boards can take to build leadership pipelines, strengthen CEO performance partnerships, and prepare for what lies ahead.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I’m Nanci Hibschman, President of C3 Nonprofit Consulting Group.

C3 exists to partner with the world’s most impactful organizations to navigate people and culture solutions. Our vision? A society in which nonprofit employment is synonymous with meaningful work, thriving culture and competitive, fair and sustainable pay.

Your CEO is leaving. You just don’t know when. Maybe it’s 6 months from now. Maybe it’s in three years. But statistically speaking, 68% of you watching this will face that transition within five years – and the vast majority of you will have no formal plan for it.

Here’s what the research tell us:

Only 29% of nonprofits currently have written succession plans, and most boards underestimate how long their CEO will stay. 70% of leaders plan tenures of less than six years.

But there’s encouraging news: Internal successors have a 75% success rate after three years, compared to 64% for external hires.

That performance advantage comes from something specific – intentional leadership development.

And it starts at the top. When you coach and develop your CEO, when you have transparent conversations about performance and growth, you create the conditions for identifying and nurturing the next generation of leaders. You’re building a talent pipeline.

And the most strategic boards we work with are doing three things together:

First: There’s an active CEO performance partnership. They have regular structured conversations that support success, identify development needs, and strengthen board-CEO relationships.

Second: There is investment in CEO coaching and development – recognizing that even experienced leaders need support, fresh perspectives, and skill growth. This might include executive coaching, leadership cohorts, or executive learning opportunities.

Third: Engagement in succession planning – using performance insights and development investments to identify internal talent, understand capability gaps, and build leadership depth across the organization.

This should never be crisis management — it’s strategic capacity building. And its also smart governance.

So let me leave you with this: You wouldn’t run programs without measuring outcomes, and you wouldn’t fundraise without a strategy. You wouldn’t manage finances without oversight. So why would you leave your most critical leadership transition to chance?

Ask yourself three questions.

1) If your CEO resigned today, would you have a name? Not just a process – an actual prepared leader?

2) If your CEO is struggling, would they tell you? Or is there a culture where performance conversations only happen once a year, or when things are already broken?

3) Are you building leaders, or just managing to a single position?

Your succession plan isn’t a document in a drawer. It’s a living system of performance partnership, intentional development, and strategic foresight.

The best time to build it was five years ago. The second-best time is now.