The Accountability Paradox: Why Great Leaders Get Themselves Off the Hook
You've been on the hook for years. Maybe decades. You know every system, every donor relationship, every staff member's work style. You can troubleshoot the database in your sleep. Board members text you on weekends. You are the institutional memory, the firefighter, the one who starts big projects, and the closer.
And I believe that you are diminishing your organization's accountability to its mission every single day you stay this way.
This is the accountability paradox: the leader who won't get off the hook becomes the organization's greatest liability. Not because you're doing bad work—you're probably exceptional—but because your indispensability is a structural failure pretending to be dedication and commitment.
What Does It Mean to Be "On the Hook"?
Seth Godin introduced this phrase to describe the state of being responsible for an outcome—truly responsible, where failure falls on you. When you're on the hook, you're the one who will be called if something breaks. You're the one who loses sleep. You're the one accountable.
In Turkish culture, there's a practice called askida ekmek—bread on a hook. Customers at a bakery can pay for extra bread and leave it hanging on a hook for someone who needs it but can't afford it. The bread waits there, available, until someone who needs it takes it down.
As I wrote in "Practicing and Knowing When It's Time," this image captures something essential about leadership transitions: knowing what to leave on the hook for others, and knowing when it's time to take yourself off the hook entirely. In the metaphor of askida ekmek (go with me here, for just a moment), the practice isn't about the bread abandoning its purpose. It's about the bread fulfilling its purpose by being available for the right person at the right time.
Being "on the hook" in nonprofit leadership means you're the bread that's been hanging there so long, you've forgotten you were meant to be taken down.
Real Accountability Means Ensuring Delivery Continues Without You
Let's be clear about what accountability actually means in nonprofit leadership. It's not about how much you personally deliver. It's about ensuring delivery continues regardless of who's in the role. Real accountability is architectural, intentional, and scaffolding.
The nonprofit sector has confused exhaustion with excellence for too long. We celebrate leaders who "give everything" to their organizations, who can't take vacations, who respond to emails at midnight. We frame this as commitment, but it’s not. It's a failure of systems, governance, and succession planning.
When you are the only person who can do critical functions, you haven't built organizational capacity—you've built organizational dependence. And dependence is the opposite of sustainability.
The Martyr Complex Is a Mission Risk
Accountability checkpoint: Answer these questions honestly, right now:
If you were to win the lottery tomorrow and decide to escape to your dream home location, could your organization execute its current strategic priorities for the next 90 days?
Could someone access your donor relationships, grant reporting deadlines, and financial approvals without you?
Have you documented the decisions only you currently make and why you make them that way?
Does your board know what organizational functions would immediately fail without you?
If you answered no to any of these, you are not being accountable to your mission. You are being indispensable, which is different and dangerous.
(and let’s be honest here, funders have a responsibility here as well to insist that their relationships with Executive Directors and CEOs begin to spread across multiple individuals in the organization, not just the highest of executive level leadership)
Staying Too Long Diminishes Everyone's Accountability
Here's what happens when you won't get off hooks you should have passed five years ago:
Your staff stops developing leadership capacity. Why would they? You're handling it. They learn to escalate to you instead of building their own judgment. You think you're being supportive. You're actually limiting their growth.
Your board atrophies. They defer to your expertise, your relationships, your institutional knowledge. Governance becomes rubber-stamping. They're off the hook entirely because you're so thoroughly on it.
Your organization becomes resistant to necessary change. New ideas threaten the systems you've built and you may feel that innovation disrupts your expertise. The organization calcifies around your tenure.
Your successor is set up to fail. When you finally do leave—and you will, either voluntarily or involuntarily—the organization faces a crisis instead of a transition. Everything you didn't systematize becomes an emergency.
This isn't theoretical. I see it constantly in my succession planning work. The most damaging transitions aren't caused by bad leaders leaving. They're caused by good leaders who stayed on the hook for too long.
The Ultimate Accountability Move: Ensuring Continuity Without You
If you actually believe in your mission—not your role, but the mission of your organization—then your primary job is to make yourself replaceable. Making yourself replaceable doesn’t mean irrelevant or unvalued. Simply, replaceable.
This means:
Documenting your decision-making frameworks, not just your decisions. Don't just track what you do. Capture why and how you decide. What factors do you weigh? What values guide trade-offs? This is transferable institutional knowledge.
Building redundancy in critical relationships. Every major donor, funder, partner, and community connection should know at least two people from your organization well. Not as your plus-one, as independent relationships.
Creating clear authority and decision making matrices. Who can approve what? Who needs to be consulted? Who must be informed? If this only exists in your head, it doesn't actually exist.
Developing your leadership team's strategic capacity. Stop protecting them from board dynamics, political complexity, and hard decisions. Bring them into the rooms where strategy happens. They need practice before you're gone.
Planning your own succession, even if you're not leaving soon. Especially if you're not leaving soon. Emergency succession plans. Leadership pipeline development. Knowledge transfer protocols. This is the new definition of leadership professionalism.
Practical Exercise: Your Hook Audit
Take 30 minutes this week (or do it now) and complete this audit. Be brutally honest—no one's watching.
List every organizational function you perform that would stop or fail without you:
For each function, answer:
Is this actually part of an ED/CEO role, or have I just always done it?
Could this be done by someone else with proper training/documentation?
What's preventing me from delegating this right now?
What would I need to create (system, documentation, training) to hand this off?
By what date will I actually do that?
Now the hard question: Which of these am I holding onto because the organization needs me to, versus because I need to feel needed?
Circle those. Those are your highest-risk hooks.
What Getting Off the Hook Actually Looks Like
This isn't about abandoning your responsibilities. It's about evolving them.
Getting off the hook means:
You move from doing to designing systems for doing
You shift from being the expert to building expertise in others
You transition from holding relationships to facilitating relationship-building
You change from making decisions to making decision-making frameworks
The leader who gets themselves off the hook doesn't disappear, they elevate. They focus on the work only they can do right now—usually strategic direction, culture-setting, major partnership development—while systematically preparing for the day when someone else will do even those things.
The Succession Planning Connection
Every conversation about getting off the hook is actually a conversation about succession planning. And succession planning isn't just for when you're leaving—it's how you lead well while you're staying.
Proactive succession planning means:
Written plans for emergency leadership transitions (because emergencies happen)
Documented institutional knowledge before it walks out the door
Leadership development as organizational strategy, not HR paperwork
Board governance that functions independently of any single staff leader
Organizational resilience that doesn't depend on any one person's competence
This is what accountability to mission actually requires. Not your endless availability. Your strategic preparation for your inevitable departure.
Your Accountability Assignment
Before you move on from this article, complete one action:
Identify the single most critical organizational function that currently depends entirely on you. The one that would cause the most immediate damage if you were suddenly unavailable.
By the end of this week, create whatever is needed to make that function survivable without you. Documentation. Training. System. Delegation. Whatever it takes.
Then move to the next one.
Because getting yourself off the hook isn't giving up on your organization. It's the highest form of accountability leadership offers: ensuring your mission outlives your tenure.
What's Next: Mapping Who's Actually on the Hook
You've identified your own hooks—the functions and responsibilities that depend on you. But here's the harder question: does everyone else in your organization know what hooks they're on?
In the next article in this series, we'll map organizational accountability across your entire leadership structure. Because the problem isn't just leaders holding too many hooks. It's that most organizations have never clearly defined who holds which hooks at all—creating gaps where everyone thinks someone else is responsible, or overlaps where board members are on hooks that belong to staff.
We'll build a framework for identifying who should be on what hooks, where your accountability gaps are hiding, and how to fix them before they become succession crises. If you can't answer "who's responsible for this?" clearly and quickly, you're about to find out why that matters.
Sources:
Godin, Seth, The Practice
Hattaway, Naomi, Practicing and Knowing When It's Time