Katie’s Way: What We Decide to Keep
What an unplanned sticky-note wall taught me about honoring a leader’s legacy—without freezing the next one in place.
Katie didn’t get to plan her departure, and her team didn’t get a transition plan. No notice period. No chance to ask the questions you only think to ask when you know someone is leaving. Katie, the longtime Executive Director of her organization, died suddenly. No warning. No goodbye.
When I stepped in as interim, I expected to do what interims usually do: stabilize the org chart, keep the lights on, hand off cleanly to whoever came next. That is not what happened.
What happened was grief—raw, unscheduled, and present in every meeting whether we’d planned for it or not. So, we made room for it.
The Wall
I started asking staff, board members, and community partners a simple question: what did you love about Katie’s leadership? Not a survey. Not a structured interview. Just an invitation to talk about someone they missed.
Here’s what I didn’t expect: the answers repeated. Different people, different roles, different relationships to Katie—and the same two or three things kept surfacing.
I taped a giant sticky note to the wall and started writing down what people offered, anonymously. Then I invited everyone else to add their own. The wall became a living memory and an unintentional data set, at the same time.
Finding the pattern—and naming it
Once we had enough entries, we did one of the things our interims prioritize across all of our engagements: we looked for the pattern. Two things had the most votes, by far. We named them Katie’s Way.
We didn’t ask the next leader to become or replicate Katie. We asked them to protect two specific things—and we told the staff, in writing, that everything else was fair game for the incoming leader to shape however felt right to them.
That second part mattered as much as the first. A team that has just lost a leader they loved will, understandably, want to hold onto everything. Naming only two things gave the new leader actual room to lead, instead of stepping into a museum.
Why this matters beyond Katie’s story
I didn’t set out to build a framework that day. I set out to help a grieving team breathe. But what we built on that wall is something every nonprofit can do on purpose—before there’s a sticky note in sight, before grief forces it.
Succession planning usually focuses on operations: who signs what, where the passwords live, what the board needs to approve. All necessary. None of it touches what actually gets carried forward in an organization’s culture.
“A team that’s just lost a leader they loved will want to hold onto everything. Naming only two things gives the next leader room to actually lead.”
Katie’s Way is a tool for naming the culture worth protecting, and being honest, out loud, about what’s open for a new leader to redesign. It works whether a leader is retiring after thirty years or, like Katie, didn’t have the chance to leave on her own terms.
I talk about a version of this on the podcast—episode 51 looks at what BoardSource calls the “hard-to-follow executive,” and the particular weight a new leader carries when stepping into the wake of someone the team adored. Katie’s Way is one way to lighten that weight on purpose, instead of leaving the new leader to guess.
If your organization has lost a leader—suddenly, or after decades—you don’t have to wait for a sticky note moment to find your own version. You can build the wall on purpose.
Click below to download your Katie’s Way worksheet for your team, a helpful tool for leadership and legacy, no matter the departure situation:
Naomi Hattaway is President and Lead Advisor of 8th & Home, where they help nonprofit leaders and boards navigate executive transitions through their Leaving Well™ framework.
Referenced: “Interim Executive Leadership and Leaving Well,” Leaving Well podcast, episode 51, naomihattaway.com/podcast/interim-executive-leadership