It’s challenging to lead a team that knows you are on the outs. Earlier that day, I’d led an internal meeting at Generation Citizen, the civics education nonprofit I co-founded but was preparing to leave in June. Knowing the board would be announcing my successor within the next month, some team members pushed back against decisions I was making. At that point in the transition, they saw me as the steward of an established vision, not the person who would lead them into the future. They craved clarity on the direction the organization would take under the new leader and certainty about the roles they would play.

Six months later, I’m still at the helm of Generation Citizen. Since 2009, we’ve trained thousands of US educators to teach our civics education curriculum, and almost 100,000 students have completed the course work. We’ve helped pass landmark civics education legislation in Massachusetts, and we’ve led efforts to ensure that equity is a fundamental component of civics education via a listening tour and steering committee funded by the Hewlett Foundation. But while I’m proud of our success, I’m as ready for something new as I was at the beginning of the year. I still feel the organization would benefit from having a leader whose lived experience is more similar to our students—predominantly students of color whose government continues to perpetuate practices like unjust policing and housing discrimination, and devalue their voices and experiences. It’s still time for me to leave. We’re finally ready to announce my successor, and so that last, hardest month has come again.

In addition to the “prepare for the unexpected” lesson, three other bits of advice from my initial discussions with founders and new leaders (also covered in this series) stand out as particularly useful to transitioning during uncertain times:

  1.  Put the Organization First (and the Ego to the Side)
  2. Prioritize Finances
  3. Empower Other Team Members, and the Successor

Read the full article about leadership transition by Scott Warren at Stanford Social Innovation Review.