 Jim is a serial for-profit and nonprofit tech entrepreneur and then here comes everything he's done in his whole career. He's a MacArthur Fellow and he's also recipient of the Skull Award for Social Entrepreneurship. He's here for all these accolades but also because he's gonna talk about his time at Benetech where he was CEO for 30 years before stepping aside and starting his later nonprofit tech enterprise Tech Matters, which is the one that you seen on the screen. And Benetech is now Silicon Valley leading non-profit technology company and as I understand you built machines so that people with disabilities could read independently. No I added a few things. He actually... anyway I'm a journalist so I added a couple more things. So then we also have Astrid, Dr. Astrid Schultz and she's co-founder of Armillaria, which is a system design and technology collective dedicated to creating global distributed democratic infrastructure for mobilizing the knowledge the people and the capital require to achieve the sustainable development goals. She's also co-founder and past chief financial officer at Cyprus Unite and she's gonna talk a bit more about that and Cyprus Unite maybe some of you know it's a founder led hybrid cooperative that is creating the culture capital and community for the next economy. So thank you Astrid for coming and then we also have Amalia Brindis Delgado by the way Brindis her last name means like when you cheers so we have you know interesting names today the ocean the rain the cheers lady the fruit exactly that's how this panel was created and then and then well Amalia is actually Pantha Ria's foundation chief strategy officer and what does that mean when in this role Amalia facilitates strategic design and partner resources to deepen the foundation's commitments to food sovereignty climate justice and grassroots liberation across the Americas and the Caribbean. She has 20 years of experience in global and US based nonprofits and she's also gonna talk to us about that previous experience in the past and her current experience as a founder which is always good to hear from funders and how well-being is becoming more and more of a conversation in the funder space but we're here to talk about their own experiences and how they moved on and what can we learn from their own lived experiences so I guess let's start with the person with the longest tenure here in the in the panel right Jim actually as I was saying was CEO for 30 years of Benetech and at some point November 2018 according to Lincoln in you actually decided to step down when did you decide that and why did you take that decision well you know 20 years ago when the first Skoll awardees got together the most popular topic was succession right but then no one left because they watch the end the movie like the series TV series right so I think I think this issue of moving on is is quite important and coming out of the for-profit tech industry you know when you move on you get paid off right you know you may not be in charge of your organization anymore but you got acquired you you made some money unfortunately are a lot of our identity is as non-profit leaders is tied up in our nonprofit so so I did try to hire a number two about ten years after that and that failed because I didn't give him any responsibility and so he left after a year and I went oops and of course you know every year we'd be talking to our peers like that doesn't work oh okay what else doesn't work oh I don't know undermining your successor every chance you get so I heard all these things so so finally at the first so cap I met the the leader who became my number two at Benetech and eventually my hand-picked successor she had a lot same background I did engineer entrepreneur she built up our largest social enterprise about five years before I left we did a reorg and she became the president and most of the organization reported to her and I thought that I was going to join the Hillary Clinton administration in 2016 and for some reason that didn't work out and so so I had an extra couple years to work on leaving but the main reason after 30 years you're kind of low on new ideas and the donors are tired of you and it just seemed like I'd stay too long which I had I will talk later about where you headed after that but before we do that let's hear from Astrid because your experience at Seabroos United was actually Seabroos United sorry Seabroos United was actually very interesting because you said from the beginning you knew from the beginning you had an expiration date how did that work tell us more about that it's actually fun to talk after Jim I'm not his hand-picked successor in that previous role but I was that woman who succeeded a 30-year founder of a nonprofit and it also didn't work because of the reasons that Jim mentioned this you know identity is wrapped in it's really difficult to let go he thought he was ready he wasn't ready and the board was like but we were here for you unnamed old white guy who you can figure out for my LinkedIn profile right but but it was really it was really it's actually really interesting right because in the for-profit world the board say it's time for you to move on because it's in the best interest of the business most nonprofit visionaries get to hand pick their boards and it's excruciatingly difficult to be that successor who can appoint a board that's favorable to them and actually backs them up and so when and I left my previous role actually to take to spin out the tech company now known as Amalaria and it was also very interesting how that came about spinning out a for-profit tech enterprise out of a out of a nonprofit and then the quick origin story of zeppos unites myself and three other also women tech entrepreneurs were frustrated with the state of venture capital and how we were not finding much love there despite having been prolific fundraisers and other capacities and we accidentally co-founded this movement right that's we wrote a thing and people read it all over the world and said where do we sign up and we said oops I guess we better start something and I said to my co-founders then I am absolutely not starting a nonprofit organization these things are not scalable what we're about entrepreneurship for the next economy if that's going to be a proposition that we're going to have to keep selling to funders it will fail and it should be something that all of us can get paid to do because that's the other thing you learn the hard way in the nonprofit world you don't get paid anything near what you're worth in terms of the value you're creating in the world and so we very quickly landed on the construct of this really wants to be a cooperative that is literally owned by the enterprises like Amalaria that is meant to benefit and yes the four of us you know wrote the original manifesto but almost the next day thousands of other people showed up right so we had this idea that well sure we wrote it down we called it zebra or zebra because that's the international pronunciation but from the get-go it was clear that other people would co-built this with us and so we had an opportunity in that corporate form in a multi-stakeholder cooperative technically we're a limited cooperative association registered in Colorado you can specify different shareholder classes and we did so we created a class for the four founders called the doula class because we're midwifing something into the world right and it has a sunset clause so in our organic documents we basically planned for our obsolescence and that's what that's the path one now I'm the last to roll off at the end of this year from any sort of day-to-day operational and programmatic responsibilities and then I'll just have a temporary seat on the board there's sort of a doula seat on both the for-profit side of the house and the nonprofit side of the house but it's by design so we contemplate our obsolescence on day you know T minus 100 yeah that's so so fascinating thank you for sharing and we'll get to know a bit more in detail how that works out in case you want to copy what they did and Amalia before your your time at pantheria you've been involved with many nonprofits right and you actually were co-founder of asylum access which is an 18 year old international organization that fights for the rights of refugees and you left the founding board of as founding board chair of asylum access and also started another organization at a time where a CEO of 30 plus years was leaving so it seems like where there's a theme here so tell us a little bit more about that experience thank you and I wish we had thought about that clause when we started asylum access because I think it would have helped us much earlier on before I left asylum access so we we started a group of us decided to start asylum access after working in in different countries at a moment where refugees were treated as people who deserve humanitarian aid as opposed to people who inherently had rights and an opportunity to integrate where they landed and put their kids in school find jobs and thrive in their communities as opposed to live for generations some of them in refugee camps and and that idea was in in terms of finding a group of us mostly European and an American folks to start this organization was to bring resources where funding wasn't naturally coming from in a right space for these rights based solutions as opposed to humanitarian solutions and and the reason why I wish we had a clause was because we immediately many of us as part of the the US based entity and then the local offices that began to be formed including an Ecuador where Michelle who's part of so cup now started as the country director there was that we wanted the leadership to be local leadership we wanted the folks who who led to be from communities that were impacted and very much a part of the to be part of the solution to be part of the strategies that were formed fast forward about 15 years into the life of the organization there's there was a constantly a discussion about like do we decentralize the leadership do we move from being a US based headquartered organization and and you know the questions around like how do we continue to find funding if we're not here how do we continue to have that sort of bridge but on the other hand how do we know that the leadership is truly representative of the communities that we're serving that isn't top down that isn't kind of this doing the same band aid sort of solutions that a lot of humanitarian organizations end up doing for many many many years and so fast forward to now I actually was on staff for a short blip of time for four years and and it took several of us and the leadership staff to leave the organization in order to begin to see that sort of like distributive leadership as we call it happened within the organization where it's one representative and two locally placed and and and locally driven as opposed to driven from from the US and so that was very much a part of the result of this sort of transformation and and which I'm very proud of and I think still continues to need work and none of this ever like you never get to like the end point where you said like the leadership you know we've won here and so that's that's part of the journey with asylum access and so then I went to Hispanics and philanthropy and having an organization that had been around for 35 years with the founding CEO and and some of the things that she set up and leaving after so many years I really have learned from and and and really regard as being positive practices including she left the incoming leadership team with transition funds so she had organized and and got in funders who were loyal to the organization to commit two to three year funding to give cushion to the incoming CEO there the funders and the board members were open to a new vision with the new leadership team and that was actually part of the interview process was this discussion around what could a 2.0 look like and built in enough time for the incoming CEO and leadership team because I came in at the same time with the CEO to have a learn listen and learn time so it was like six months of doing that work and and so and then an opening from to continue the relationships with these funders and and then I would say the last thing that we came into was a smaller programmatic team an operational team for us to be able to then build out based on this vision so you know we didn't have to do the letting go to build up with the new vision but it was so very thoughtful transition that we came into and I just wanted to share that because I think it's not always the case especially when you're moving from founder to to to second to a 2.0 type of CEO right exactly and actually that's part of the conversation that that we wanted to have also with you Jim right because feeling in your shoes after 30 years or all these process that you like in the end ended up being 30 years must have been hard right and as a journalist when when I was researching right who am I going to be talking to you and I was looking at the company at Benetech right now and Benetech the CEO has only been the current CEO has only been in a position for a year right so I was like well okay so so what happened what happened between the time you left a 2018 and in the gap until the new CEO came in how did that how did that work that transition work well I mean I think we did a really good job of planning and obviously I had identified a handpicked successor and she had had a great track record but I think being the second CEO of a social enterprise after a long serving founder is like the toughest CEO job I can imagine right it's really hard and in a lot of ways I think sometimes you know the third CEO has the room to actually do things and change things so I mean I stayed out of her way I kind of I didn't I skip board meetings I didn't take calls from any of the team like no that's he's in charge now and you know the pandemic hit and it still didn't work out and I you know at least it wasn't my fault but but I don't so and I think that part of this is that sometimes being a CEO is a is a tough is a tough role to fill and and I think we left left the organization in a pretty good shape we had a like an eight million dollar a year contract from federal government had another three or four years to run so so the fundraising pressure wasn't there but I think that the the number one thing that the founder takes with him or her is the funding relationships and and yes you actively hand them off and it's not the same right and so and in some cases the founder has built up those funding relationships over decades of going to conferences and meeting people and all that and even even with all that it just it didn't work out for Betsy in the org and then we had Christy Chin who was our board chair ended up being the interim CEO which is a heroic thing to take on for anyone it's not what you think you're doing when you volunteer to be on a non-profit board and then and they tried to say Jim don't you want to be the interim CEO I'm like no can't do that ever again but I did chair the search committee and now I am sure his two year anniversary is November next month so okay then I didn't do my math right but still but still you did pick up well still but I really want to commend you and thank you for for being so open right because sometimes we plan and we can try to plan it to the detail and the reality kicks in right and sometimes things don't work and there are things that you cannot plan for and it's great to hear your experience and be so open about how sometimes these transitions don't go as smooth as one would want and I tell you about the happy ending yeah so so so it didn't work out for Betsy but she is now the senior technical advisor to the head of Social Security Administration which was the position I was being recruited for yes four years earlier so so karma worked out one of us needed to take on that job at Social Security and it just happened to be Betsy's timing so I'm really delighted that that that's her new way of delivering service that's that's amazing so Astrid tell us a little bit more about this doula system and just so you know zebra zebra zebra's unite actually they did a blog post where they documented this whole process and let me just quote they were like they said that they spent Astrid and another co-founder spent about a year finding nurturing and supporting an operational team that could take up to the model of the day to day responsibilities so what did you do how did that work and especially if you were to start again and write you know do it from scratch would you do anything differently well conveniently the managing directors that was United in the audience so Madeline would you raise your hand she will give you the unvarnished truth of how well that worked out but look I mean the long story short here is it's a cooperative can I see a show of hands of who's a member of a cooperative of any kind food co-op REI shop at an ASA hardware store yeah right yeah our eyes a co-op your patronage is the amount of money you spend in your gear and then you get a dividend back right so co-ops really are made by their members and the activities of their members in the case of zebras unite so yes they were the four doulas and think of us as the people who just gave birth to the concept and the framing but then basically on day one you know organizations and companies like my own showed up that leaned into the building of the co-op with sweat equity right so my company provided infrastructure design and strategy and we had a marketing firm and we had some pro bono it's not pro bono legal when you're a member of a cooperative and you're basically putting that in a sweat equity and so we had two hundred fifty thousand dollars worth of founding member contributions in sweat equity to build the co-op and in that frame when you think about it right so we have the great good fortune of having a very leader full it's not a is it an organization sure it's a company it has a corporate form but it is full of people that have way more talent than I ever will and things like you know financial systems for example so it's the recruiting of the next leadership team then becomes much more of a question in our case of how do you codify the the the sort of the standards and and what we're trying to do in the world in a way that somebody else can pick up and sort of read in a it's not quite like reading a manual but that's sort of the the aspiration and so it forced us to be really intentional about documenting what was in our brains and again Madeleine will tell you that Mada and I who were the two doolers who were in the more operational roles I don't know maybe we were eighty percent successful fifty percent I don't know twenty percent I don't know she's grinning we had some degree of success and actually writing down what was in our brains and setting up operational systems for example for documenting funder relationships from the get-go and that may or may not have made it easier right I think the proof is in the doing we're just coming out of a really wonderful high energy high ups and downs transitional year it's ever seen I'd so I mean we you can watch this isn't it's it's a living experiment in real time and in fact that's what we call our framework now experimenting in public because it turns out there isn't a handbook for an international hybrid social enterprise formed by entrepreneurs that is democratic and all those things right so it's not like there any analogs we can we can look to so we're kind of making it up and with all that said what I would we do it the same way um probably you know I think the the basic DNA of saying yes there's a number of us who gave name to something that resonated so strongly around the world and yes we put in the original sweat equity and we wanted that you know recognized in a share class that by the way the share class sunsets so we just become general shareholders after some time I think all those are really sound design elements and what it allows us to do for example in this hybrid structure it's not like I I go away right I just stopped being in the day today I I just you know come January 1 I just get to be a regular co-op member and so when there's an opportunity to contribute like we've tried to set up sort of the swim lanes and the opportunities for any co-op member to contribute so some funder calls me up and says hey Astrid you know I had a funder conversation today about all the way all the doors they could walk through to give money to Zebra C night it'll be my great pleasure to convert that for the co-op because guess what I get a referral fee now look at that it's almost like we aligned incentives I'm also a recovering economist so I think we finally hit the design where these incentives begin to align and then it's hopefully not so hard for you know subsequent leadership teams and operational teams to to take over I think what you've experienced from the founder side and what I've I've experienced on the successor side in the nonprofit world it's just too painful for words it creates too much harm and brain damage and exhaustion that makes our whole sector kind of unstable and again like we've it's been a it's been challenging at Zebra C night but at the end of the day we're still all owners in this crazy juggernaut that we're building together so I find it a little bit easier to put up with the hardships so as I was listening to you talked about there's no handbook right and let's just quickly create the index of that handbook together so I'm just throwing this at you so that we can co-create on the fly so what would be some chapters in that handbook from your own experience the transition handbook of leadership definitely the sunset clause sunset and that you can do that in a nonprofit you can do that in your bylaws doesn't you know you could have done that anybody can do that you know actively develop your middle management because a successor might be in there okay what else well one of the things that we've been looking at as in philanthropy in the support of other organizations is this really dynamic transition of founding EDs or CEOs to leaders of color and and that often times comes from both a call to action from the communities being served the the ecosystems and the stakeholders that are part of that organization and sometimes from the board and the leadership and and oftentimes it's not enough so the there's biases that exist once a CEO of color a BIPOC CEO of color comes on there's what's called now a glass cliff where there isn't the support that is needed for that incoming CEO and so when you're when you're looking to make those sorts of shifts for organization meaningful shifts to BIPOC leadership there has to be written in that in that index is like what is the work that needs to be done internally with the board with staff in order to actually meaningfully bring on and and shift the culture the shift the loyalty for the like the the biases in terms of like who was the previous CEO and give space and abundance for the person that's coming in for their leadership style their leadership vision and so that's I would add that early on in that that's great we already have three chapters thank you yeah go ahead well I want to double click on the board governance piece to this right so the board that helps you create an organization especially in the non-profit world is great to have that be friends and family literally or old classmates from you know Williamson College like somebody I know and that's okay Williams College whatever but but then you need to evolve your board with the life of the organization right and so frequently what we see in the non-profit world in particular is you have boards that don't know about governance that don't know about organizational development that don't know I mean they may have never engaged their their own privilege right and so you can't expect those boards to be effective in supporting the next CEO or the next ED so I would you know add a big dollop of board work and agreements it's very explicit outcome based agreements with the board about how they will support a transition and funding is a key issue right and you just touched on it and since you now work at a funding organization I think it would be great to know what also you're doing at the pantheria foundation because I don't know if you know this foundation I recently learned about about you guys because we were in Bogota in the well-being summit and they supported that that summit that happened also in several parts of the world bringing by the well-being project bringing well-being to the social impact sector so thank you for supporting that and pantheria if you go into their website and look at all the values I find it fascinating that one of the values is centering well-being with our partners and teams and that's amazing to to read from a funder so how do you put that into practice especially in these leadership transitions and I'll start that are a lot of our values are all of our values are influenced by the work of our partners and and what organizations are saying that they want to center I was just at another panel on the well-being track at the room was full I think it's a moment where people are saying we need to center the well-being of our staff and are in the communities and we need to think about how we heal as a justice framework how do we play how do we bring love and joy into our work and so this is very much a reflection to what we're hearing from from our partners and from our allies our colleagues and so pantheria is a small family foundation that works primarily in the Caribbean and the Americas and we work on issues of climate justice and food sovereignty and supporting grassroots movements and part of the way that we support organizations is not just through general operating funds that support the work that the organizations do but also thinking about their well-being through additional resources including one working with consultants and other organizations that provide support for ecosystems so similar to the well-being project other organizations that are available to organizations both at a regional level and a thematic level that can help nourish and stabilize build stronger infrastructures of organizations so thinking really holistically about how those organizations are able to thrive and part of the conversation around transition is thinking how do we think about transitions leadership transitions in organizations as like really cyclical as not just happening at the moment where you have a notice from a CEO but much earlier on right where that CEO can think about early on succession planning and like Jim said like building up the middle management so that management is is prepped and ready to step into leadership role before there's that sort of departure and then beyond the hiring of a CEO that hopefully thinks about you know centering equity and that hiring processes is the transition support that's needed for the staff and the CEO and one of the practices that I've seen is the separation of hiring with with the transition work that's needed so panoramic thinks about these things and I think part of the work that we do that supports that is is are the infrastructure building partners that's what we call them like well being project or we work with change elemental here in the US that that are nourishing organizations outside of the funder space right like funder shouldn't be driving that but rather it should be conversations within the ecosystem that organizations work in thank you and we'll get to talk a little bit also I would like love to know at some point who else is out there doing this but coming up next we actually have more questions prepped and I would be asking questions for like I don't know three hours actually because at some point I'm gonna have to leave my role as the co-founder of the nonprofit I'm leading currently so I'm deeply interested in your knowledge and at the same time we'd also like to hear from you so remember that you have the cards and if you don't our friend Rain is there and just pass them on to you so he has empty cards if you have questions feel free to type in the card write down the questions and he'll bring them to me as we go along okay so that way we'll have enough time to bring in the questions from the audience let's let's dive in a little bit into what I think is the elephant in the room which is you know it sounds great everything you're saying sounds great I'm taking so many notes we even have like the first chapters of a handbook for transition and at the same time I think that you guys are rare species because my experience from the outside looking in and to transitions or into organizations is that most founders or leaders stick to power and never leave or leave whenever they have to because there's some reason right so they they stick to power for too long sometimes they step aside but they're still there they take those calls or like talk to funders they are there it's like a shadow like a ghost right or you know when they leave the organization the organization ends up sinking because it was not well planned so why is this happening and how can we avoid that from happening well I think the answer differs by whether you're in the non-profit world or the for-profit world that structure really matters here right which is why we incorporated as a crazy hybrid where a non-profits the non-profits job from the corporate structure perspective is to hold the golden share to basically prevent us from being bought and tempted into demutralization right like it has that golden share has one job and one job only and that is it has veto power in the case like Facebook comes along and whatever wants to buy zebras unite so structure really matters and I think on the non-profit side I think non-profits are the ultimate lifestyle business is what it comes down to so really I mean have a visionary idea are you compelling speaker are you even vaguely charismatic got some rich friends great there's a non-profit in your name right no really it's a it's a lifestyle business and when you look into under the hood and look at how a lot of the like the corporate culture sort of grows up around the the founder myth and his or her mythology right and then of course these things aren't a fragile because they were never designed to be scalable multi-generational family businesses or worst case in some cases there are family businesses that's a whole different set of problems where like you know I mean I worked in a setting where every day was bring your child to work day for the founder of 30 years and that caused all kinds of problems and so it's really difficult to come in after the fact then and then and then rejigger it like I mean if you if you come in in the for-profit world as a transition CEO you understand what your job description is because that's a that's a known thing and then the non-profit world we really don't have that right like even when you're the hand-picked successor you are your boss isn't really able to tell you where all the corpses are buried all the skeletons are hidden because it that's their blind spot they live in that blind spot so how is he really going to equip you to succeed that I mean I had to learn that the hard way and so I think that's that's why some of these transitions are so difficult and also why like we're letting go is difficult in many cases there isn't a good place for a non-profit executive to move on to like where do you go you want to transition to politics are you or being a funder right but they're not I mean you think about it like a lot of and a lot of the current founders who've been around for a long time who are GeneXus or baby boomers they're feeling absolutely vibrant and alive and nowhere near a retirement age and also they've probably not been able to pay themselves quote-unquote market rates so their retirement portfolios are laughable compared to their corporate colleagues and so there's this there these weird forces basically that creates this inertia so it's not because anybody is is vain or you know egotistical or some of them are but I don't I I tend to believe that that the inertia is actually a bigger problem in in the industry and there's not enough you know regulatory or peer pressure to be more thoughtful about you know periodic renewal or you know like having paid board members or having the performance of the organization tied to the tenure of board members for example because I don't know about you all but I had board members in a non in other non-profit settings where they could be super smart business people run very large companies successfully and they show up in your non-profit board room and it's like why are we here again oh are we going having dinner at a nice restaurant today it's almost like they forget a lot of their savvy so those are just some of my relatively unorganized thoughts well um I've done for-profits and I've done non-profits and I like non-profits better um but um the people are a lot nicer uh but you know venture capital is playing an important role some of them do maybe if you want them to do anyway um but I think a lot of the criticisms that you talk about are the issues that we face right um not a lot of financial stability it's tied up not sure what's next I mean when you're in politics and your parties voted out there's a think tank that will absorb you there is no think tank for the non-profit CEO to go hang out while they go find their next thing and so that's why people hang on to these jobs for a long time and people also say well we need you to raise the money and when fundraising is so tied up with the individual and liking the founder um it makes it really hard but that's the way non-profit fundraising tends to work and so so these issues come up now people do overcome them I mean I'm happy to report that the majority of school award winners that are non-profits have gone through a CEO transition since they got the school award we were 20 years on it's actually happened but it's harder it takes longer and people are really worried about what's on the other side of transition now I've been on the other side of the transition and I'm having a blast doing something different but I didn't know that and I think that I think the thing that really helped me is like a lot of non-profit leaders I had nothing invested in my development I didn't get review for my first 20 years stuff like that but I did get to go through the well-being project and lo and behold within a year I was ready to let go any advice on how to avoid that transitions from happening I mean the only thing I was going to add from or maybe just plus to in terms of what was said was how oftentimes the ego the individual's identity the dreams and goals and all the things performance is tied to the identity of the organization and that becomes so difficult to separate for board members for funders and so there's a worry that the organization will not continue beyond that person that individual and so that work needs to be done for the sustainability of the work and to allow for succession to allow for new new energy new blood diversity of representation of you know and leadership the creativity that that brings I think that that's one of the things that we've seen over and over again and and how this is a question from the audience which is connected to this right because you do have some power working at a funding organization right how but maybe you can speak more broadly about other initiatives because the question here from the audience is how can donors funders help this transition and how do these work for a social enterprise especially for investors I know you have the funder lens but if you have any other advice for this second question that'd be great well one of the things that I've seen funders get involved with is exactly this this piece around the loyalty to the original CEO and the funding is because of the individual as opposed to the organization and very much the relationship is so tied there that there's a loss of perspective and funders will leave when a CEO leaves that sort of thing but what funders can do one I think is stay out of the way and I've seen many examples where there's funder collaboratives or funder relationships within an organization and there's a lot involved the funders get very much involved with that piece and the funding is tied to the succession and the performance of the organization during succession and what we've seen as good practice of what we recommend is that there is an ability for the incoming the outgoing and the incoming CEOs to feel a spaciousness around the transition that isn't tied to immediate performance where they're you know where programmatic grants that have specific project-based metrics are if you're doing that sort of funding funders should be shifting away from that but either way like during that moment that time of transition after time of transition can be about five years if not longer there is really a cushion for there to be that learning the change management that's required during that sort of transition the planning and then the implementation from there and so five years where there is a loosening of those sorts of metrics and I'm not sure if this works in the fester space I'm sure it does like and it's really about giving interesting that leader to be able to go through those steps to be able to lead successfully so I'm listening to you I'm listening I'm like I'm getting like the enermies thinking oh my my god but I'm fearful of like going to some of my funders and saying you know I don't want to be here in five years can you help me out leaving is this for your real or is something in my head I'm not saying to be there for five years before you leave I'm saying you leave and then there's five years for the you know between that sorry let me just frame it differently I'm like maybe some people in the audience resonate with this inner fear that was appearing or I was noticing which is how do I approach a funder who I really want to commit to the organization and say but I really want to leave I believe in the organization but I really want to leave but keep funding us and actually help me fund this transition well I mean I think I think that the number one thing is like if they believe in the work that's being done they have to believe that that that the leadership team and the organization can decide on what's best for the organization and allow for this sort of transition and I mean I'd love to hear if you had examples of this because oh I just I remember meeting Jeru Billamoria who's a serial social entrepreneur internationally famous and when we when I first met her she said you know when I started an organization I tell all the donors that I'm going to leave within five years it's very beginning and all of us went ooh ooh I could never do that Jeru pulled it off but I think part of it is also expectations right so sometimes funders want you to promise to be there forever right I want to be like Jeru I can't be yeah I mean it's it's so simple in some ways right I've been as board president of an NGO and I on my day of accepting the role I handed in my resignation letter signed two years since it's not rocket science I mean just declare yourself that said if you have a long-term relationship with funders in another setting we had I was also on the board of an organization where the ED had thought about her transition and had set it in motion and hadn't read the room correctly and so one funder was just livid that she hadn't gone to him with ample warning visited him in his home and sprung the news over dinner and he was just really really angry that he had received the you know Dear Jim or Dear John letter you know that she had sent to the 10 closest funders announcing this decision and he has never funded the organization again so you know I don't know you have to know the personalities of the people you're working with as the outgoing CEO that's for sure we have a couple of experiences from people in the room that want advice so let me just be the voice of those experiences and see what voice them emerges we're experiencing longer founding CEO transition we're two years into this our CEO became the CEO last year and our founder founder is still highly involved so as a senior executive and leader what is the best way to continue to support this transition it is difficult to untangle between the new CEO and the founder at times the staff feel it and notice it in the team the staff team notice it is well that's a tough one I think if you're in a senior leadership role in that organization your first responsibility is to your staff and to their experience and trying to figure out how you can soften that make it easier be a voice create a mechanism for them to provide candid feedback that you can then package up so be a buffer between the staff and the CEO the founder and their successor that are creating the tension right so you can use your relative positional power to say well here are 20 anonymous pieces of feedback that this thing Europe thing is not working what are you going to do differently about it if there is a board committee that is involved in this transition I would provide that same feedback to the board and then I would also do some shopping there are actually some really interesting consultants in this space a friend of mine Eric Vines out of Oregon has an organization called page 2 partners they specialize in basically crisis management transitional CEOs work with the board so be a source of resources like that to your organization because chances are this is the first time this situation is happening for your staff for your outgoing CEO for your incoming CEO and for your board and again somebody like Eric he has been a transitional CEO something like 20 times he's my age in his 50s and like what are you doing are you a masochist he's like no I just really like this like he likes to be a turnaround CEO for nonprofits and charges like 90 bucks an hour so there are actually resources like that that where you can be helpful like on the one hand be helpful to your staff and then also look at the cluster that's being generated in this transition and be helpful to the process by offering up resources so some I don't know I just said plus one to that okay more similar situations and a lot of questions and I'm going to try to sum up these two have to do with how to be supportive and appreciate the outgoing CEO while at the same time making you know making it successful a successful transition and helping them the successor right so what are approaches and strategies to be to do this well I'll tell you you know the new CEO at Benetech is Ion Kishore and and I'm wanted for two things donor intelligence and why do we do this this way and it's all mediated through the new CEO right so the staff doesn't see me doing that I give my predecessor sort of the or my successor successor the inside sort of scoop but he's in charge and he has the information and if he asked for my advice he may ignore it or take it and there's really no consequences to that and one of the great things I see about this organization is that they are re-examining decisions that I made in 2005 to those 10 to 15 and changing them because frankly some time has gone by and those decisions might have been good then they're not good now so like me explaining why we did it then he says well I don't think that applies anymore they're like well you're right and that really helps since I'm still on the board it also helps that you know I'm kind of there to support the new CEO is my primary role on the board it is not board governance it's not trying to be the board chair anything like that it's like just be there for what my successor needs so Jim is modeling really good boundary hygiene right that's not a given that's pretty self-aware not a given lots of failures before getting there but today you're modeling good boundary hygiene so if you're in an organization where that's happening I encourage you to take this data set of three and say best practice is for people in your situation I've just learned I just went to SOCAP I just learned turns out best practice is to have transition buddies who can help you create appropriate boundaries around this process and just project that just make that this is now a data set of three we can tell you boundaries are a good thing and you should insist on them or should encourage outgoing and incoming to develop these boundaries and then just be helpful you know do they need and do they need sort of the the ombudsman for the transition can you be that you know is there is there an anonymous suggestion box that needs to be put in the in the kitchen I don't know right whatever that might be definitely healthy boundaries and insist on them from a process perspective and put a time limit on them so I've seen successful strategies in CEO transitions in the non-profit world where the outgoing founder was given sort of a special contributor portfolio reporting directly to the incoming CEO on a very specific thing Jim every day I want you to spend an hour journaling about your funder relationships at the end of that year you know there's you know pages and pages whatever it is like a special project that creates a boundary around what the outgoing CEO does so I can just add a couple things one this might be obvious but celebrating the outgoing CEO really recognizing that leadership giving them a sense of closure in terms of their leadership I think really goes a long distance and maybe more than you think right like celebrating a little bit more than you might want to do and then I think the second thing is is the boundaries piece like actually giving them a really specific role I completely agree with that where I've seen one organization this the outgoing CEO placed herself on the board of the organization and her role was way too nebulous and kind of amorphous in terms of what she was able to do so really specific emeritus role goes a long way as well Amalia this question is for you it's from somebody in the audience that started with a the organization with a succession plan and tried to create a flat organization and this person says as an immigrant founder I finally understood that we can't do that in its fullest form in America in 2023 it sounds like distributive leadership might be a good alternative please share more to talk to you if there's time after I'm happy to hear more wonderful yeah I mean there's a really wonderful organization that's based in the Bay Area called Leadership Learning Community that is working with leadership staff on Libertory Leadership Practices I guess not leadership staff they're working with all the staff of nonprofits in order to really embed this sort of distributive leadership models that we're right now what we're seeing is our organization's moving to co-leadership practices and this is going beyond that to understand the sorts of assets that you have within an organization and how do you value and allow for for folks to lead from that as opposed to I think what have been traditionally models built from you know whether in the nonprofit from corporate models or very hierarchical that doesn't fit the values of the organization so how do you creatively create leadership structures that serve the purpose of the organization and its values it's really hard work I mean it's work where you are very much focusing the relational aspects as well as the the more like quantitative aspects of the folks you have in the organization the needs the motivations and always knowing that that changes every day all the time right as being so relationship but relational and human centered in terms of the work that needs to get done but definitely leaning on resources like the learning learning leading community and then other folks like Change Elemental that are also thinking about co-leadership and and have had co-leaders and their framework as well and then there are other resources that are out there but those are the top two that come to mind Justice Funders are another that fund specifically to get organizations to have get to a place of the sort of co-leadership framework there are other funders who are also helping organizations be able to have this sort of like organizational development resources to get them there I just want to plus one the how hard that work is if you're trying to build sort of a new kind of corporate culture that is you know sort of predicated on co-equal leadership and responsibilities we ran into this head on at Zebra City Night not just as a co-op but also with the sort of intentions we had set around the internal culture so for example I'm you know I was the CFO and we had you know we started open book sort of an open books practice right from the get go and people had sectors and areas of responsibility and control over the finances we'll come to find out everybody who was in a position of authority and agency over a piece of a sector of work of the co-op a lot of people carried really heavy money trauma like huh well didn't see that one coming right and so now you find yourself in a sort of in this next loop of like oh so now we have to because people are bringing their whole selves to the work as they should how do you now engage trauma that gets retriggered in the process of trying to build a flat or you know equitable kind of organization because the answer can't be that we say oh in order to fill this role you must have an MBA and so that took some I mean active unlearning certainly on my part active undoing of corporate culture that is doesn't matter if you're in a for-profit or non-profit world in the U.S. only to come find out to find out that there are precious few if any playbooks like I'm looking for the playbook that helps you know organizations develop the kind of numeracy that is required if you're going to run any kind of enterprise and do it in a way that aligns with people's different learning styles and different life experiences and uh boy was was I sitting in a blind spot there and it's it makes the work extremely hard and it also turns out in my experience at least that people may come to an organization or into a setting where they expect and want the sort of shared power and and agency and then they discover they're not ready for it your friend Madeline likes to say they may not have the spoons to do the work and they may not have known it they may have told you that they want the power and that they're right they're ready for the rights and the responsibilities and then they discover they they can't do it because it triggers too much of of of their embodied trauma right and then what do you do so that's it's just next level difficult so I I applaud you for trying that we're still working through it at Zebra's Unite and I think all of us who are engaged in that work need maybe some kind of yeah peer organization where we can just share lessons learned and then write that book because I think we need a new corporate governance book I just want to say the answer to when there is no book is to talk to your peers right by hearing 20 stories of successions that went well and badly I learned things to avoid and things to try to emulate and and then you know then we start working on the book so that's finalized by looking at how you you moved on right and Jim you already told us that you're super happy so tell us a little bit more about your connections to Benetech right so because you said you stayed on the board of directors you're there to support the CEO how does that feel watching it from the sidelines well in the tech industry we call it founders remorse you know I could I could run this better than the people who bought it or I sold it to crap but but you know again but founders remorse gets paid off in the for-profit sector in the nonprofit sector you just have to kind of suck it up right you know if you're giving up the responsibility you have to give up feeling like you had to do something about it and so so part of this is to just take a back seat to just not say oh if I was in charge I'd be doing this and so but it is a it's a challenge but but let's just say after five years I've got it down I guess it's is it easier because you're now in your new venture oh yeah oh yeah okay so maybe that can be another advice get another get something new and of course of course this is where the thing is you know the the benetech team they go oh Jim's a hell of a fundraiser he found some new donors can I introduce benetech to those donors and the answer is usually yes and in your case Astrid you're still connected to CBRAS Unite in so many ways so but they're a bit like out of the box so can you explain your connections and and how your experience can serve others to keep in touch but not so much yeah so a lot of like a theme that runs through what we've been talking about especially in the nonprofit setting is scarcity right and sort of conflicts of interest and how how you know are you cannibalizing benetech's donors or whatever right so I'd never seen out what we try to do is create a confluence of interests so I am now looking forward to just being a co-op member through my company so Amalaria is a member of the co-op in one share class and then I'm personally a member in the doula share class the doulas have a seat each on the not all four we have one seat on the for-profit side of the house on the board and one seat on the nonprofit side and these are named seats for the doulas to provide some continuity but I'm for example on the nonprofit I hold the nonprofit seat right now for our group and I'm not a I'm not a I'm not a what you may call it so what I'm looking for no no like not but not president treasurer or secretary so I'm not an I'm not an officer right that's the word thank you officer language and on the for-profit side those are democratic elections per shareholder class so when our class sunsets to the general class then the four of us will just be among the hundreds of co-op members that are in that share class and then we may or may not run for the board seat right and then so I alluded so that's on the governance side on the operation side I'm just out of it and my job is to remind people that I'm out of it right so if a funder calls me I'll say sorry you need to talk to Madeleine or you need to talk to Alex on the on the non-profit side that's my job now and and when or when the media call right they keep trying to pin us down as oh you're the founders like no there's four of us and also you need to be talking to the new team right so that becomes sort of the maintenance of the boundary is the job on the operational side but I'm out of the operations and then everything else now is showing up as a co-op member in projects and opportunities as they arise and so the co-op for example has put the call out for example we just had our own gathering in DC last week and a call went out to all co-op members to help with fundraising from sponsors and there was a very clear incentive mechanism built into that right there's basically a finder's fee great I'd love to participate that way and that actually creates some different incentives where we're now valued including financially valued for very specific contributions we make to the success of the overall thing there is no more uncertainty it's not a more first like I've experienced on the on the on the non-profit side it's very clear what my role is Amalia I'm sure there are funders in the room if not this is getting recorded and hopefully putting a podcast so what is your advice to any funder listening about how they can support leadership transitions efficiently I think I've said it where it I think just to think about the timing that it takes and the funding to create the spaciousness for for true transition to happen moving beyond just like imagining that it's just a singular leadership change but rather the transition for the institution for the staff for the leader for the board and all the resources that are required to go through that transition Any other final thoughts for those people who really or those organizations who really really got inspired to do it to do the change to help support the change from an economic perspective I was just thinking about this previous question about you know as a leader who leaves or a board member who leaves I think that there's always an ability to think about how do how do I bring resources to the organization how do I continue to be an advocate in a way that is non-intrusive to the new leadership and and as some you know I think for a lot of us being here at SOCAP or Connectors where we think about the social connections and the assets that we can bring through those connections and so even though we're not actively involved with an organization there's always a way that I think we can think about making new introductions directing new types of resources and funding to that cause and to that organization I think it's okay to feel that sort of like the heart strings pulled you know you dedicated 20 or 30 years or if you dedicated five or one I think that there's still a place to be able to do that but allowing for change as well