Managing Leadership Transition for Nonprofits: Passing the Torch to Sustain Organizational Excellence

4. Leadership and Strategy

Leaders without a strategic plan have nowhere to lead.

Good leadership is strategic leadership. The fundamental challenge of leadership is to align all resources—human, technical, and capital—in the service of the organization’s mission. But missions are broad statements of purposes. They don’t speak specifically about what is needed to succeed. Strategies do. They specify. They prescribe how to focus energies and resources. A good leader, then, must have an effective strategic plan and must manage that plan with great discipline.

In the introduction, we proposed that leadership transition represents a crisis, a moment of both danger and opportunity. Consider a board president leading the organization during a transition. ...