95: The Accountability Paradox - Why Great Leaders Get Themselves Off the Hook (Series Part One)
Discover why staying on every hook diminishes your accountability to mission, and learn to audit your own indispensability before it becomes an organizational crisis.
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The Off the Hook Framework: A Leadership Series on Accountability, Delegation, and Leaving Well
You're exhausted. You're the only one who knows how the donor database works. Board members text you on weekends. Your team escalates every decision to you. You haven't taken a real vacation in three years.
And everyone tells you how dedicated you are. How committed. How essential.
Here's what they're not saying: your indispensability is an organizational liability.
This is the accountability paradox at the heart of nonprofit leadership. The leader who won't get off the hook—who holds every responsibility, hoards every relationship, controls every decision—isn't demonstrating commitment. They're creating a single point of failure with a nonprofit tax status.
Real accountability isn't about how much you personally deliver. It's about ensuring delivery continues without you.
Because here's the truth no one wants to say out loud: You're temporary. Your tenure will end—through retirement, new opportunity, burnout, termination, or death. The only question is whether your organization will be ready.
I bring a specific lens to this work: I'm an interim leader. I provide temporary executive leadership for nonprofits in transition. Every engagement I take begins with an exit date. I'm hired knowing I'm leaving. I've learned to lead with non-attachment—caring deeply about the work and the people while holding my departure lightly. I document everything. I build systems that run without me. I transfer relationships that belong to the organization, not to me personally. This isn't because I care less. It's because I care about sustainability more than being indispensable. What I’ve learned from being professionally temporary is that every leader should operate with an interim mindset. Because functionally, you are interim. Your tenure is temporary even if you don't know the end date yet.
This series is for nonprofit CEOs and Executive Directors who know intellectually they should delegate but can't seem to actually do it. It's for board members who don't know what hooks they're on—or who are on hooks that belong to staff. It's for funders and foundation program officers who see organizations struggling with leadership transitions and want to support better succession planning. It's for anyone who's ever said "if I don't do it, it won't get done right" and meant it.
Everything in this series is succession planning work—just not the way most people think about it. Succession planning isn't just creating a document for when you leave. It's how you lead every day while you're staying.
It's documenting your decision-making frameworks so they're transferable. It's building redundancy in critical relationships. It's developing your team's strategic capacity instead of protecting them from complexity. It's getting yourself off hooks you've held so long you've forgotten they don't belong to you.
Most nonprofits don't have written succession plans. Most leadership transitions are managed as crises instead of planned transitions. Most organizational knowledge walks out the door when leaders leave because it was never captured.
This series is about changing that—one hook at a time. The greatest act of nonprofit leadership isn't being indispensable. It's building something that doesn't need you to be great. Welcome to The Off the Hook series. Let's get to work.
Quotes:
“This is the accountability paradox: You are the leader who won't get off the hook and are becoming the organization's greatest liability. Not because you're doing bad work, you're probably exceptional. But because you being indispensable is a structural failure, pretending to be dedication and commitment.”
“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, and we frame this as commitment, but it's not. It's a failure of systems, governance, and a lack of succession planning.”
“The most damaging transitions aren't actually caused by bad leaders leaving. They are caused by the good leaders who stayed on the hook for too long.”
“Succession planning isn't just for when you're leaving, it's how you lead well while you're staying.”
To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/
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This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.
“This is the accountability paradox: You are the leader who won’t get off the hook and are becoming the organization’s greatest liability. Not because you’re doing bad work, you’re probably exceptional. But because you being indispensable is a structural failure, pretending to be dedication and commitment.”
Transcript:
Here we are. It's time to dig into the four part series of Off the Hook. So today we're going to talk about part one, which is the accountability paradox, why great leaders need to get themselves off the hook. You've been on the hook for years, maybe decades. You know every system, every donor relationship and every staff member's work style, you can troubleshoot the database in your sleep board.
Members text you on weekends and you are the institutional memory, the firefighter, the one who starts big projects, and the closer. I also know, in addition to those things, that you are likely diminishing your organization's accountability to its mission every single day that you stay this way. This is the accountability paradox.
You are the leader who won't get off the hook and become the organization's greatest liability. Not because you're doing bad work, you're probably exceptional, but because you being indispensable is a structural failure, pretending to be dedication and commitment. So what does it mean to be quote on the hook end quote?
Seth Godin introduced this phrase in his book, the Practice to describe the state of being responsible for an outcome. Truly responsible, where failure falls on you. When you are on the hook, you are the one who will be called, if something breaks, you're the one who loses sleep, and you are the one accountable.
In Turkish culture, there's a practice called Quida ecec, which is bread on a hook. Customers at a bakery can pay for extra bread and leave it hanging 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 an article called Practicing and Knowing When It's Time, this concept 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 qui ecec, go with me here just for a minute. The practice is not about the bread abandoning its purpose. It's actually about the bread fulfilling its purpose by being available for the right person at the right time. Being on the hook in nonprofit leadership is the same as meaning that you're the bread that's been hanging there so long, you forgot that you were actually meant to be taken down.
Real accountability means ensuring that 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 actually about ensuring that delivery continues regardless of who's in the role. Real accountability is architectural intentional, and it's 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. And we frame this as commitment, but it's not. It's a failure of systems governance and a lack of succession planning.
When you're the only person who can do critical functions, you're building organizational dependence and dependence is the opposite of sustainability. The martyr complex is a mission risk. So here's an accountability checkpoint for you. Just three minutes into this episode, I'd like you to answer these que questions honestly right now.
And if you can, I'd welcome you to listen to the question and then pause this episode and then answer it for yourself either quietly in your head or get a notebook or open up an audio that you can record 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?
Can someone at your organization, either staff or board access your donor relationships, your grant reporting deadlines, and your financial approvals without you? Have you documented the decisions that only you currently make and why you make them that way? Is your board aware? If you're at an executive level, what organizational functions would immediately fail without you?
Now I'm not gonna know what you answered, but I can tell you that if you answered no to any of these, you are not being accountable to your mission. You're being indispensable, which as we've said before, is different and it's dangerous. And let's be honest here too. Funders also have a responsibility to insist that their relationships with executive directors and CEOs begin to spread across multiple individuals in the organization, not just at the highest of executive level, level leadership.
We tend to blame executive directors and CEOs for holding those funder relationships when it's a two-way street. So if you're listening and you're a funder or a program officer at a foundation, think, think about what you can do to help mend this issue in the system. How can you mend this issue in the sector by asking the people that are in your portfolio to be introduced to other people in their organizations.
Okay. Moving on to the concept that staying too long diminishes everyone's accountability. Here's what happens when you refuse to get off of hooks that you should have passed on five years ago. There are four uh, examples here. The first one is that your staff stops developing leadership capacity, and my question is, why would they?
You're handling everything. They learn to escalate to you instead of building their own judgment. You think you're being supportive and you're actually limiting their growth. The second option here is that your board atrophies. They defer to your expertise, your relationships, your institutional knowledge and governance becomes a rubber stamp.
They are off the hook entirely because you are so thoroughly on it. Third, your organization becomes resistant to necessary change new ideas, threaten the systems that you've built, and you may feel that innovation disrupts your expertise. So the organization instead, calcify around your tenure. This is incredibly dangerous.
Number four, 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, every single thing that you do not systematize becomes an emergency. I see this consistently in my succession planning work.
The most damaging transitions aren't actually caused by bad leaders leaving. They're caused by the good leaders who stayed on the hook for too long. So the ultimate accountability move here in part one of this series is ensuring continuity without you. If you actually believe in your mission and you want to see your community thrive because of the mission of your organization, then your primary job is to make yourself replaceable.
That doesn't mean that you are irrelevant or unvalued, it simply means that you're replaceable. This means a couple of things. It means that you must document your decision making framework and not just. Your decisions. Don't just track what you do. Capture the why and the how. You decide. What factors do you weigh?
What values guide the trade-offs? This is beautiful, transferable, institutional knowledge that not many leaders do, but you can be one of the few. This also means that building redundancy is so important in critical relationships. Every single, major donor, funder, partner, and community connection should know at least two people from your organization, not as your plus one for parties, events, and galas as independent relationships.
Number three, this means that you need to create 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. Two more here about what this means to be replaceable. Develop your leadership team's strategic capacity.
You must 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. You also need to plan your own succession, even if you're not leaving soon, especially honestly, if you're not leaving soon.
Emergency succession plans, leadership pipeline development, knowledge transfer protocols. This to me is the new definition of leadership professionalism. So let's get into a practical exercise. This is an audit of your hook. This is gonna take you about 30 minutes, and I would love for you to be brutally honest.
No one's watching, and you definitely don't have to report into me about what your audit shows. So list every organizational function you perform that would stop or fail without you. You might wanna do this in a couple of sittings. You might wanna write down the things that first come to you and then come back to it and add a little bit more.
The next thing is, for each function, answer these five questions. Is this actually part of my role, or have I always just done it? Number two, could this be done by someone else with proper training and documentation? Number three, what's preventing me from delegating this right now? Number four, what would I need to create either a system documentation or training to hand this off?
And number five, by what date will I actually do this? Now if you're frantically trying to write down these questions, you can go to my website, naomi hadaway.com/articles. You will see the four part series there. This is part one that has this hook audit exercise in it. The last question is the hardest one, and I am holding your hand very softly and very gently when I say this, which of these items, organizational functions am I holding onto because the organization needs me to versus because I need to feel needed?
Circle those functions. Those are your highest risk hooks. Nice. So how does it actually look and feel to get off the hook? I wanna remind you and encourage you that getting off the hook isn't about abandoning your responsibilities, it's simply about evolving them. Getting off the hook means you move from doing to designing systems for the doing.
You shift from being the expert to building expertise in others. You transition from holding relationships to facilitating relationship building, and you change from making decisions to making decision making frameworks. I'll say that one again 'cause it's a little, it's a little confusing. Instead of making decisions, you make the frameworks that allow for decision making.
The leader who gets themselves off the hook doesn't disappear. They elevate. They focus on the work only they can do right now, which is usually strategic direction, culture setting, and major partnership development while systematically preparing for the day when someone else will do these things. 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 we all know that emergencies happen. It is documented institutional knowledge before it walks out the door with you.
It is leadership development as organizational strategy, not just HR paperwork. It's board governance that functions independently of any single staff letter at the leader at the executive level, and it's organizational resilience that doesn't depend on any one person's competence. Accountability to mission and fidelity to the model requires this.
It does not require your endless availability, and it actually doesn't thrive from you being on all the time. Your strategic preparation for your inev inevitable departure is accountability. So one, uh, two sets actually of, uh, assignments. Before you move on, identify that single most critical organizational function that you identified earlier, and by the end of the week, I really want you to create whatever's needed to make that survivable without you.
Then you move on to the next one. Then once you've identified your own hooks, the functions and responsibilities that depend on you, the bigger question is, does everyone else in your org organization know what hooks they are on? In the next episode of this series, we're going to map organizational accountability across your entire leadership structure.
And I know you're like, oh, I don't have time for this. But the problem isn't not just that you are holding onto too many hooks, it's that most organizations have never clearly defined who holds, which hooks at all. This creates gaps where everyone thinks that someone else is responsible, or it overlaps people that are on the same hook.
So board members might think they're on the same hook as a staff member. So in the next episode, we will build a framework to identify 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'll find out sooner than you should.
Why that matters. Thanks for listening. As always, you can find me@naomihattaway.com or on LinkedIn or Instagram. I'd love to hear actually from you how this landed with you. Does it freak you out? Is it too much? Does it feel overwhelming? You can reach out at naomi@eighthandhome.com. That's N-A-O-M-I at the number eight T-H-A-N-D-H-O-M e.com.
Until next time.
If you are an organizational leader, board member, or a curious staff member, take the leaving while assessment to discover your organization's transition readiness archetype. It's quick and easy, and you can find it@naomihadaway.com. Slash assessment, that's Naomi N-A-O-M-I, hattaway, H-A-T-T-A-W-A y.com/assessment.
To learn more about leaving well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace. You can also see that information on my website. It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide to shift culture and to create transformation.
Until next time, I'm your host, Naomi Hadaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a Navigation Guide for Workplace Transitions.