The Tenure Question…
Every few months, someone asks me a version of the same question: when is this going to go back to normal? When will nonprofit leaders start staying ten, fifteen, twenty years again, the way the founder or the legendary executive director before them did?
I understand the hope behind that question. But I've stopped answering it the way I used to. Because the honest answer is: it isn't going back. And I've come to believe that's not the crisis it looks like at first. It's actually the opening we need.
The Numbers Behind the Feeling
If you lead a nonprofit, sit on a board, or work anywhere near executive search, you've probably felt this shift even if you haven't seen it named. It's not your imagination. Nonprofit and government organizations led every industry in CEO departures in 2025, with several hundred transitions recorded that year alone. Only about a third of nonprofit chief executives currently have a written succession plan in place, according to BoardSource's most recent national survey, and even that figure likely overstates readiness at smaller organizations, where succession planning often doesn't make it onto the agenda at all.
This isn't a blip we're waiting out. It's the result of three forces converging at once, and naming them clearly is the first step toward building for the reality we're actually in, instead of grieving the one we've lost.
Force One: A Demographic Wave That Was Always Coming
The generation of leaders who built much of today's nonprofit sector is retiring, and not quietly. Roughly 11,000 baby boomers reach retirement age every day nationally, and research from the Building Movement Project suggests as many as three in four nonprofit leaders, boomers especially, expect to leave their roles within the next five to ten years. At the same time, the leaders who would traditionally succeed them, largely Gen X and millennial professionals, simply don't stay in roles the way prior generations did, in this sector or any other. That's not a character flaw. It's a different, and in many ways healthier, relationship to career and tenure. But it does mean the twenty-year executive director is becoming the exception, not the model to plan around.
Force Two: A Sector Running on Empty
Layer onto that a level of sustained crisis our sector hasn't seen in a generation. Nearly all nonprofit leaders, 95 percent in the most recent survey from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, say they're concerned about staff burnout, and a third say they're concerned about their own. That's not surprising given what's been asked of this workforce since 2020: rising need for services, tightening or unpredictable funding, and, in more organizations than any of us would like to admit, boards that have quietly disengaged right when their engagement mattered most. Nonprofit turnover now runs close to double the rate of the broader labor market. Leaders aren't leaving because they've stopped caring. They're leaving because the job has become unsustainable to sustain.
Force Three: The Surprises Themselves
The third force is one I've spent a lot of time writing about, because I see it constantly in my own work: leaders who take a role in good faith, based on what they were told, and discover within weeks that the real job is something else entirely. I call this the No Surprises problem, and it's its own driver of short tenure, separate from burnout or demographics. A leader hired to grow fundraising who instead spends their first year doing operational triage doesn't usually stay five years. They leave, and the search starts again, often handing the same incomplete picture to the next candidate.
Why This Changes the Question
Put those three forces together, and you get an environment where shorter tenures aren't a temporary disruption. They're the operating reality for the foreseeable future. Which means the question boards and leaders should be asking isn't "how do we find someone who'll stay twenty years?" It's: how do we build organizations, and a sector, that don't depend on anyone staying that long in the first place?
That reframe is the spine of everything I write about. Over the next several pieces, I want to walk through what building for this reality actually requires:
Accepting the shift, rather than waiting for a return to a model that isn't coming back (this piece)
Building systems, not people, as the thing your organization actually depends on for continuity
Making room for creative, emerging models of leadership, including interim and fractional executives, as a legitimate long-term strategy, not a stopgap
Finding the right leader for a real three-to-five-year run, through genuinely transparent hiring
Creating an actual succession plan, not just talking about having one
None of this is about resigning ourselves to instability. It's the opposite. Organizations that build for shorter tenures, deliberately, tend to handle leadership change as a matter of course rather than a crisis. The ones that don't will keep experiencing every departure as an emergency, no matter how good the next hire is.
The tenure question isn't going away, but I think we've been asking the wrong one. Let's ask a better one instead.