Kick Lines & Quiet Goodbyes: What the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Teach Us About Legacy Without Succession

There's choreography for the kick line … but not for the goodbye.

The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are a spectacle of precision—every hair curled, every toe pointed, every smile practiced. But behind the sequins and stadium lights is a relentless cycle of selection, silence, and quiet disappearance. Watching the Netflix series about their process, I immediately thought of the correlation between this repeating scenario and Leaving Well.

What they're navigating—high turnover, legacy leadership, untold grief, and zero succession infrastructure—isn't just reality TV. It's what I work with every day inside nonprofits and mission-driven organizations across the country.

Churn Without Ritual

Every year, hundreds of young women try out for the DCC. They make it to training camp. They get evaluated, critiqued, and sometimes cut. No ritual. No closure. Just ... you're out (with an escorted teary walk to collect their things).

The DCC treats constant turnover as business-as-usual, but each cut carries massive relational, emotional, and cultural implications. Training camp is essentially one long offboarding process—high stakes, high polish, zero collective grieving.

Your organization does this too. You just call it "strategic restructuring." We've normalized loss but refuse to ritualize it.

Legacy Leaders as Cultural Bottlenecks

Judy Trammell and Kelli Finglass are two legacy leaders who are simultaneously the DCC's greatest asset and most dangerous vulnerability. Former cheerleaders turned culture holders, they are the memory and machinery behind the brand. They've been there for 40+ years, and they're still running the show.

But there's no visible plan for what happens after them.

They are irreplaceable and un-succeeded—a combination that should terrify any board member worth their fiduciary duty.

In the final episode of Season 2, a departing cheerleader asks Judy what will happen when she herself retires. The camera captures Judy's waning smile and complete silence. That moment? That's your organization's succession planning in real time.

When your legacy lives in the heads and habits of two people, it's not succession—it's scaffolding built on personality. And when they leave (or are forced to), the culture they held won't cascade. It will collapse.

Evaluation Without Care

The DCC makes cuts based on performance, perfection, and presentation—rarely on holistic care or cultural contribution. Think about your own organization's last leadership transition. How many people were let go not for misconduct, but for "not being the right fit"? How many departures were handled like performance reviews instead of human transitions?

This evaluation-without-context model doesn't reckon with the human cost of constantly reshaping "the team" through extraction. It treats people as replaceable parts rather than whole humans who deserve dignity in both their arrival and departure.

Your succession planning shouldn't look like a talent competition. It should look like stewardship.

The Succession Plan They Need (And You Do Too)

If the DCC called me—though I wouldn’t show up in boots and clipboard—here's what I'd recommend:

Legacy Mapping: What are Judy and Kelli carrying that no one else knows? What institutional memory lives only in their heads? Who else holds pieces of the culture outside of them?

Narrative Preparation: How will stakeholders be invited into the transition? Will there be storytelling? Tributes? A co-designed handoff that honors the past while making space for the future?

Successor Support: What's the onboarding container for the next generation of leaders? How do you protect successors from comparison fatigue and legacy backlash?

Cultural Detangling: What parts of the current culture belong to the outgoing leaders personally—and what parts should be retained, released, or reimagined?

Sound complex? It is. But it's also necessary work that most organizations avoid until crisis forces their hand.

Your Call to Action

The DCC is high-visibility, high-polish, and high-turnover. But strip away the sequins, and it's still an organization with real humans facing real transitions—desperately needing rituals of leaving, tending, and storytelling.

They're experts in performance but failures in process. The glitter doesn't hide the grief, and succession without care is just turnover dressed in sequins.

Which brings me to you:

• What legacy are you holding that no one else can carry yet?

• What grief are you avoiding by pretending it's just "another transition"?

• What would it look like to choreograph leadership succession with as much intentionality as you put into your strategic plan?

Leaving Well isn't about sentimentality. It's about sustainability. And if you don't have choreography for the goodbye, you're setting your successors up to stumble in the dark.

Your organization deserves better than quiet disappearances and cultural collapse. It deserves succession planning that honors both legacy and future—with structure, storytelling, and care woven throughout.

The question isn't whether leadership transitions will happen in your organization. The question is whether you'll be ready when they do.