The most consequential decision a nonprofit board will ever make is hiring its executive director. Yet in moments of transition, some boards instinctively defer to staff members who seem more familiar with day-to-day operations. This approach, while well-intentioned, fundamentally misunderstands where the responsibility for nonprofit board hiring lies and often sets both the organization and its next leader up for difficulty.
Understanding why boards must own this process is essential for any organization approaching a leadership transition. The distinction between board governance and staff management becomes nowhere more important than during an executive search.
The Governance Imperative: Why Nonprofit Board Hiring Responsibility Matters
Hiring the chief executive is not merely one of many board responsibilities. According to the National Council of Nonprofits, recruiting, hiring, and evaluating the executive director stands among the board’s most critical duties. This responsibility cannot be delegated because it sits at the heart of what governance means.
The board exists to ensure the organization fulfills its mission over time. Staff members implement programs and manage operations under executive leadership. These roles complement each other, but they are not interchangeable. When boards cede hiring authority to staff, they blur a boundary that protects both the organization’s accountability structure and its people.
The incoming executive director reports to the board, not to other staff members. If staff members select their own supervisor, the new leader enters with compromised authority. The person hired to provide direction arrives having already received direction from those they are meant to lead. This dynamic creates confusion about accountability that can take years to untangle.
| Key Insight: A board that delegates executive hiring to staff is essentially asking employees to choose their own boss. This reversal of accountability undermines the new leader before they even begin and creates governance confusion that damages organizational effectiveness. |
How Staff Involvement Differs from Staff Leadership
Recognizing the board’s responsibility for nonprofit board hiring does not mean excluding staff perspectives entirely. Thoughtful search processes often incorporate staff input at specific, bounded points. The difference lies in who holds decision-making authority versus who provides information.
Appropriate Staff Contributions
Staff members can offer valuable insights during a search. They understand operational realities, cultural dynamics, and the practical challenges the organization faces. Their observations help boards craft accurate position descriptions and identify the competencies that matter most for daily effectiveness.
Many organizations invite staff participation through structured input sessions early in the process. Staff might also participate in meet-and-greet sessions with finalists, giving candidates a realistic view of the team while providing the board with additional perspective. These touchpoints enrich the board’s understanding without shifting ownership of the decision.
Where Boundaries Must Hold
Problems emerge when staff involvement crosses into influence over candidate selection. Staff members evaluating finalists alongside board members, voting on hiring decisions, or holding informal veto power over candidates all represent boundary violations that compromise the process.
Even well-meaning arrangements, such as asking a senior staff member to co-chair the search committee, create structural problems. The staff member cannot objectively evaluate candidates who will become their supervisor. They may unconsciously favor candidates who seem less likely to make difficult changes. And their presence signals to candidates that the board’s authority may be negotiable.
Organizations leading successful executive director searches maintain a clear distinction between gathering staff input and allowing staff to shape outcomes.
The Risks When Boards Abdicate This Responsibility
Understanding what goes wrong when boards step back helps clarify why this governance principle matters so much.
Compromised Authority for the New Leader
When staff members drive the selection, they implicitly communicate that the new executive serves at their pleasure. The incoming leader may find their decisions questioned, their changes resisted, and their authority challenged in ways that would not occur if the board clearly owned the hire.
Staff who participated heavily in selecting their new supervisor may struggle to accept decisions they disagree with, reasoning that they helped put this person in place and can therefore push back more forcefully. This dynamic undermines the executive’s ability to lead effectively from day one.
Candidate Quality Suffers
Strong executive candidates carefully evaluate potential employers. They look for healthy governance structures, clear reporting relationships, and boards that understand their role. When candidates sense that staff members hold unusual influence over hiring, they may question whether the board will support them through difficult decisions later.
The most qualified candidates often have options. They can afford to be selective. A search process that signals governance dysfunction may cause exactly the people you most want to attract to decline further consideration.
Accountability Gaps Emerge
If a staff-influenced hire does not work out, who bears responsibility? The board cannot easily hold accountable an executive they did not fully select. Staff members who advocated for the candidate may feel implicated by the failure but lack formal responsibility. This diffusion of accountability makes course correction slower and more painful than it needs to be. Organizations can avoid common executive hiring mistakes by maintaining clear governance boundaries throughout the process.
What Board Leadership Actually Looks Like
Boards that embrace their governance responsibility do not simply convene meetings and wait for candidates to appear. Active board leadership means owning every phase of the process while drawing on appropriate expertise and input.
Forming the Right Search Committee
The search committee should consist entirely of board members, typically five to seven individuals who can commit sustained time and attention. Strong committees include diverse perspectives: strategic thinkers, human resources experts, members who understand the organization’s culture, and leaders who can manage a complex, time-sensitive process.
The committee chair plays a pivotal role. This person coordinates logistics, maintains confidentiality, serves as the primary point of contact with candidates, and ensures the full board stays appropriately informed. Choosing a respected current or former board officer for this role signals the gravity with which your organization approaches the search.
Defining What the Organization Needs
Before reviewing a single resume, boards must articulate what success looks like for the next executive. This requires an honest assessment of organizational strengths, challenges, and strategic direction. What capabilities does the current team lack? What relationships will the new leader need to build or maintain? How has the operating environment shifted since the last hire?
These questions cannot be answered by staff members who naturally view the organization through the lens of their own roles.
Boards should also consider whether the organization’s next chapter requires different leadership capabilities than its current state. A recent HBR Leadership Podcast episode featuring Stanford professor Bob Sutton explored how leaders who successfully scale organizational wins often possess different skills than those who created the original success. The same principle applies to nonprofit leadership transitions: the executive who built your organization to its current size may have needed different strengths than the leader who will take it forward. Boards are uniquely positioned to assess this strategic fit because they hold the long-term view that staff members, focused on daily operations, cannot.
Boards bring the perspective needed to define leadership requirements that serve the whole organization over time. Those preparing their organizations for leadership changes often begin by examining the signals that indicate when transition planning should start.
Managing the Outgoing Executive’s Role
The departing executive director presents a delicate situation. They possess valuable institutional knowledge and relationships. Their cooperation during the transition is essential to organizational continuity. Yet they should not drive the selection of their replacement.
Effective boards find ways to benefit from outgoing executive insights without ceding authority. This might include asking them to brief the committee on organizational history, key relationships, and current challenges. It might mean soliciting their perspective on competencies that will matter for success. What it should not include is placing them on the search committee or giving their candidate preferences determinative weight.
When Staff-Led Processes Seem Tempting
Boards sometimes drift toward staff-led searches for understandable reasons. Recognizing these pressures helps boards resist them.
Time Constraints
Board members serve as volunteers with competing demands. Staff members who interact daily may seem better positioned to manage a time-intensive search. Yet the most important decisions rarely align conveniently with our schedules. Boards that defer to staff because they lack time are choosing convenience over governance.
If board capacity is genuinely insufficient, the answer is to engage professional support, not to delegate to staff. Working with an experienced executive search partner allows boards to maintain ownership while reducing the operational burden on volunteer time.
Desire for Staff Buy-In
Some boards believe that involving staff in selection will increase their commitment to the new leader. This logic inverts the proper relationship. Staff buy-in to executive leadership should result from the executive’s competence and the board’s clear support, not from staff having participated in the selection.
Staff members who feel invested in the selection may actually struggle more when the new executive makes changes they did not anticipate. Having helped choose the leader, they may feel betrayed when that leader’s decisions disappoint them.
Uncertainty About Process
Board members who have never conducted an executive search may feel uncertain about how to proceed. Staff members with human resources backgrounds can seem like natural resources to lean on heavily. But operational HR experience differs significantly from executive search expertise, and the governance dynamics remain problematic regardless of who has knowledge of the hiring process.
| Key Insight: The solution for board uncertainty is education and support, not abdication. Boards can learn effective search practices and understand how retained and contingent search models differ without compromising their governance role. |
Frequently Asked Questions
Should any staff member serve on the search committee?
No. The search committee should consist entirely of board members to preserve the governance distinction between those who hire the executive and those who report to them. Staff input can be gathered through separate channels, such as structured feedback sessions or candidate meet-and-greets, but voting membership on the committee is reserved exclusively for the board.
How do we gather meaningful staff input without compromising the nonprofit board’s hiring responsibility?
Create bounded opportunities for staff to share perspectives early in the process, such as anonymous surveys or facilitated discussions about organizational needs and culture. Share relevant themes with the search committee without allowing individual staff members to advocate for or against specific candidates.
What if our board lacks experience with executive searches?
This is common, especially for organizations that have not recently changed leadership. Consider engaging professional search support, attending governance training, or consulting with board members from peer organizations who have managed successful searches. Inexperience does not justify delegating the responsibility to staff.
Can the outgoing executive director help with the search?
They can provide information and perspective as a resource to the committee, but they should not participate in candidate evaluation or selection. Their role is to inform, not influence, the board’s decision about their successor.
What if staff threaten to leave if they are not involved in the decision?
Staff who condition their employment on having hiring authority over their supervisor are demonstrating exactly the boundary confusion that makes staff-led searches problematic. While the board should understand and acknowledge staff concerns about transition, capitulating to demands for inappropriate influence sets a damaging precedent.
Making the Board’s Role Clear from the Start
Organizations that handle executive transitions well typically communicate expectations clearly at the outset. The board should announce that it will lead the search process, explain how staff input will be gathered, and describe what staff can expect regarding information and involvement.
This clarity benefits everyone. Staff members understand their role without needing to guess or lobby for influence. Candidates see an organization with healthy governance. And the board establishes the pattern that will define its relationship with the incoming executive from day one.
When boards fully embrace their responsibility for nonprofit board hiring, they position the organization for successful leadership transitions. The executive they hire arrives with unambiguous authority, clear accountability to the board, and the structural foundation needed to lead effectively.
CapDev partners with boards across the nonprofit sector to navigate executive director searches that honor governance principles while producing exceptional outcomes. When your board is ready to lead its next search with confidence, connect with our team to discuss how we can support your process.
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