For many nonprofits, leadership transition is not a distant concern but an urgent one. As founders and long-term leaders continue to build and drive their organisations, questions about who takes responsibility next, and how prepared they are, often remain unresolved. Building a second rung of leadership requires investment in people and systems, long before a transition becomes unavoidable.
To explore these challenges, we spoke with Kanika Satyanand, former director of Sruti, a nonprofit working with people’s movements for over four decades; Shweta Tripathi, the current director; and Saurabh Sinha, programme director. Drawing on their experience and institutional journeys, they shared insights on identifying, developing, and supporting leadership transition.
Next order of leadership: What are the challenges?
The challenge of leadership succession begins with organisational culture. Explaining this, Kanika says, “Organisations have not built a culture of thinking about the next generation of leadership. In many organisations, founders do not develop next-generation leadership even after years. This problem exists everywhere, but it is more acute in smaller towns or villages. This is linked to founders working in mission mode with strong ideological commitment, emotional investment, and deep identification with the organisation’s vision. At the same time, organisations need to recognise that both individuals and institutions have life cycles. If, after 30–40 years, an organisation is still doing the same work under the same leadership, it may be time either to rethink its direction or to consider winding down.”
The second major challenge is the absence of institutional processes and structured systems. In the corporate sector, training, succession planning, and performance evaluation are managed through formal mechanisms. In contrast, leadership in the development sector has largely evolved through relationships and trust, rather than clearly defined systems.
Highlighting this gap, Kanika says, “In the corporate world, systems help build leaders. When we began, the development sector lacked such frameworks. Financial insecurity also remains a significant barrier. Ensuring team members’ financial and livelihood security is critical. Two to three decades ago, development work was not seen as a career, but as an alternative path of self-realisation, often disconnected from position or status. That is beginning to change.”
Shweta adds that people working with smaller nonprofits persistently face questions around salaries and livelihood security. For many leaders, this requires recognising that commitment to a cause alone cannot sustain people over the long term. Leadership development is therefore not just about skills or qualifications, but about creating organisational culture, institutional processes, and financial stability that make continuity possible.
Internal vs external leadership: Which is more sustainable?
Leadership transition is not just about selecting the next leader or filling a role. It is also about reflecting and aligning with the kind of leadership the organisation values, and the processes it chooses to strengthen. Building leadership from within or hiring externally each carries distinct possibilities and limitations.
Shweta and Kanika strongly advocate for developing leadership from within. Leaders who emerge internally have lived the organisation’s language, history, culture, and theory of change, making them more likely to stay on. As Shweta explains, internal leadership is more sustainable because it carries the organisation’s collective memory and is recognised by the team. However, this approach succeeds only when organisations allow people to grow, keep hierarchies flexible, demonstrate organisational maturity in knowing when to step aside, and hand over control. External leadership, she believes, is necessary in specific circumstances, particularly when internal leadership is still taking shape, or when organisations are navigating periods of crisis that require a reworking of institutional processes. In such moments, the effectiveness of external leaders often depends on their willingness to listen, learn, and engage with the organisation with humility, and to communicate openly. At Sruti, for example, an external director joined during a difficult period. Their open approach and willingness to understand the organisation helped steer it through a crisis before the current team assumed leadership roles.
Sruti also experimented with a joint leadership model, with two directors sharing responsibility. Reflecting on this, Shweta says, “For the first time, two of us stepped into leadership roles together. This allowed responsibility to be shared, made learning easier, reduced isolation, and created space for ongoing dialogue around critical decisions.”
How is potential leadership identified?
Identifying leadership requires careful and patient observation. The potential for leadership is not fixed, nor does it automatically follow from position, credentials, or seniority. It is a continuous process that develops through the relationship between individuals and the organisation.
Essential leadership qualities
1. Strategic oversight, not operational expertise
Kanika notes that leaders do not need to be experts in every organisational function, but they do need to have a working understanding of how these functions operate. In this context, core leadership attributes include energy, vision, and the ability to deploy people and resources effectively at the right moment.
Shweta illustrates this with an example from Sruti. While there are dedicated staff for handling specific functions such as finance and communication, emerging leaders understand all these processes and contribute meaningfully to strategic decisions across fundraising, fellowships, and outreach.
2. Understanding language, context, and change
Leadership development operates at both individual and institutional levels. One early marker of leadership is whether people understand the organisation’s language, context, and theory of change. This understanding is visible in reports, proposals, and external communications; when it also begins to shape everyday behaviour and ways of working, leadership potential becomes clearer.
According to Shweta, such clarity is critical to decision-making. She shares an example where the organisation declined funding from a major corporate donor due to ideological misalignment. “Such conviction comes only from a deep understanding of the organisation’s framework for change. Without this confidence, the organisation’s core values and structure become vulnerable,” she says.
3. Discipline matters
Emphasising the importance of discipline, Shweta says that no matter how talented someone might be, without discipline the organisation’s work remains incomplete, and ideas stay at the level of talk. Identifying potential leaders requires looking beyond their ideas to their behaviour and consistency over time. This shows up in everyday practices—whether someone plans field visits, submits reports on time, or follows through on work linked to an organisation’s statutory requirements. For leaders, this is essential, as they need to be able to set an example for others.
How to build the next line of leadership
1. Address structural inequalities in succession planning
Developing leadership extends beyond delegating responsibilities. When transferring leadership and creating opportunities, organisations must ensure that structural inequalities, such as caste, gender, class, and geography, do not become barriers.
While competence, experience, and commitment matter, identifying leadership also requires actively recognising and addressing these social inequalities.
2. Be ready to let go of control
For developing successor leadership, organisations must rethink their idea of control. In many nonprofits, leadership authority tends to be concentrated in a single individual, often because they communicate directly with donors and manage funding relationships independently. This could limit opportunities for emerging leaders.
Shweta explains, “To develop the next leader, you must first give over control, especially over funding. Leadership capacity can only be built by delegating substantive responsibilities, such as fundraising, team management, writing key reports, developing proposals, and representing the organisation publicly.” Both those transferring leadership and those stepping into it, she adds, need to recognise that readiness develops over time.
At Sruti, team members being developed for leadership now engage independently with funders, and key documents such as funder and annual reports are shared across the senior team. This shift has enabled team members to represent the organisation on international platforms, including the World Economic Forum.
Shweta adds that this is ultimately a process of trust: They are giving people space to make mistakes and trusting them again afterwards.
3. Mutual understanding in leadership transition
Both sides play a role in leadership development. Saurabh points to a structural challenge: People often do not stay in organisations for long periods. When individuals leave after four or five years, there is limited time either to develop or to assess their leadership potential. As a result, they tend to see their roles as bounded, and identify primarily as staff members rather than as future leaders.
This explains why many professionals in the sector with years of experience have limited opportunities to step into leadership roles. Short tenures prevent both organisations and individuals from investing the time needed to build leadership capacity.
4. Think beyond specialisation
Saurabh observes that as more people enter the sector with specialised education, there is a risk of becoming too narrowly focused. Education specialists stay confined to education and health specialists to health. This limits their ability to see the sector comprehensively and can hinder leadership effectiveness. In the work of nonprofits, excessive specialisation can be limiting, as leadership often requires a broad understanding of systems and the ability to think strategically across issues.
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Know more
- Learn how investing in people drives nonprofit growth.
- Read about a nonprofit’s leadership transition experience.
